In June 2023, I was conducting a media briefing in London — an on-the-record session for European journalists covering space policy and allied operations. A journalist asked a question. Mid-question, they said “Space Command” when they meant the “Space Force.” Two different organizations. Two different chains of command. Two different missions.
I stopped.
“Words matter here — I want to make sure we’re very clear on which organizations we’re talking about.”
Then I continued answering.
The room moved on. Nobody else flagged it. The imprecision would have cost nothing in that context — a journalist’s casual conflation of two military acronyms in a foreign policy briefing is not a crisis. But I named it anyway, because in the domain I ran, an imprecise command and an imprecise satellite custody instruction had the same consequence. I did not have a context in which imprecision was acceptable. I still do not.
That moment is not a story about communications. It is a story about what precision actually is — and what organizations lose when they treat it as a style rather than a standard.
What Precision Actually Is
The leadership market treats precision as a communication skill. Something you develop in a presentation course. A characteristic of certain personality types. A preference some leaders have and others do not.
This is wrong. Precision is an operational standard. It is not a preference — it is a doctrine applied to language with the same discipline it is applied to everything else that has consequences.
In the environments I operated in, language was not decoration. It was load-bearing. An imprecise targeting instruction does not produce a slightly imprecise outcome — it produces a different outcome, potentially an irreversible one. An imprecise command in a multinational operation does not get interpreted charitably by twenty-five nations who speak different languages and operate under different doctrine — it gets interpreted differently by each of them, and the seams show up when they matter most.
I brought that standard to a press briefing, not because a press briefing has the same stakes as a targeting instruction, but because the standard is not contextual. It does not switch on when the stakes are high and off when they are low. A leader whose precision is selective has not internalized the standard — they have learned to perform it under observation. That performance is not the same thing.
The organizations whose language is precise in the boardroom and imprecise in the strategy document, precise in the earnings call and imprecise in the team meeting, are telling you something about whether the standard is a doctrine or a costume.
Three Ways Language Drift Costs Organizations
Language drift — the gradual loosening of precision in how an organization talks about itself, its priorities, and its commitments — is the most expensive organizational problem that most leadership teams never name. Here is what it costs:
The first cost is alignment that is not alignment. The meeting ends with everyone nodding. The strategy is stated. The priorities are agreed upon. Six months later, three different initiatives are running in three different directions — all of them under the same strategic priority, all of them defensible as implementations of the same language. The language was imprecise. Everyone filled in the gap with their own interpretation. The gap is now six months of organizational effort.
The second cost is conviction that is not funded. An organization’s stated priorities and its funded priorities frequently diverge. Where they do, the stated priority is the imprecise one — the aspiration, the language of what we say we believe. The budget is the honest document. The gap between the two is the gap between what the organization says it is and what it actually is. Most organizations have learned to live in that gap and call it strategy. It is not strategy. It is language that has been allowed to drift from reality.
The third cost is accountability that belongs to no one. The passive constructions and collective nouns that fill most organizational communication — “the initiative will be advanced,” “the team has identified opportunities,” “progress is being made” — describe outcomes without naming who is responsible for them. When something fails, the language that described it has already pre-distributed the accountability to no one in particular. The precise version of each of those statements names a person. The imprecise version protects everyone from being named — and therefore from being accountable.
The Precision Standard in Practice
Applying the precision standard to your organization does not require a communications program. It requires three tests, applied consistently to every high-stakes conversation:
The first test: would this statement mean the same thing to every person in this room? If the answer is no — if the same sentence could be honestly interpreted two different ways by two different people — the sentence is not finished. It needs a responsible party named, a consequence stated, or a definition supplied. The meeting does not move on until the sentence means one thing.
The second test: is the responsible party named? Not a function, not an initiative, not a team. A person. “The marketing team will address this” is not an assignment. “Sarah will address this by the fifteenth” is an assignment. The difference between those two sentences is the difference between an outcome that someone is accountable for and an outcome that belongs to everyone and therefore to no one.
The third test: is the consequence of being wrong stated? Not implied, not assumed, not left to the listener’s imagination — stated. “If we miss this deadline, we lose the contract” is a precise statement of consequence. “It’s important that we hit this deadline” is an aspiration. The people in the room know the difference. The ones who needed to hear the consequence will act differently having heard it.
Run these three tests on the last strategy document your organization produced. Count the statements that pass all three. The ratio of precise statements to imprecise ones is a diagnostic.
What It Costs to Apply It
Precision is not free. This is worth saying plainly, because the leadership market frequently presents it as a neutral good — a quality that makes leaders more effective at no cost. This is not accurate.
Naming the responsible party creates accountability that collective language was designed to avoid. There is a reason organizations learned to write in passive voice and collective nouns — it distributes the accountability so widely that no single person carries it. Precision eliminates that distribution. The people who have been protected by the imprecision will notice, and some of them will resist.
Stating the consequence of being wrong makes the stakes real in rooms that have learned to keep them theoretical. There are organizations where naming an irreversible outcome — a lost contract, a failed system, an irrecoverable decision — is treated as alarmism rather than accuracy. In those organizations, the person who names the consequence is often the person who gets managed out of the room. The precision standard requires the willingness to be that person.
Stopping mid-sentence to correct a terminology error — as I did in London, as I have done in briefings and meetings and conversations across thirty-three years — signals that imprecision will not be allowed to pass. That signal raises the bar for everyone in the room. The people who benefit from the lower bar will experience it as a cost.
These costs are real. The Liberation Doctrine cannot function without the Precision Standard, because you cannot unlock what the room knows if the room’s language makes it impossible to name what is known. The capability stays locked not because people are hiding it — but because the language of the organization has not made it safe or possible to say what needs to be said with the precision the stakes require.
The One Change
You do not need to overhaul your organization’s communication culture to apply the precision standard. You need to make one change in your next meeting.
When someone makes a statement that could mean two things, stop. “What do you mean specifically?” When an assignment lands without a named owner, name one. “Who is specifically responsible for this?” When a priority is stated without a funded commitment, say so. “Does the budget match this priority?”
Do this consistently. Watch what happens to the room.
The first time, some people will be uncomfortable. The second time, fewer. By the fifth time, the people in the room will have adjusted — not their resistance, but their preparation. They will arrive having thought more carefully about what they are going to say, because they know that imprecision will not be allowed to stand.
That is not a communications program. That is a standard, applied. Words matter. Here is what it costs to hold that. And here is what it costs not to.
DeAnna Burt
DeAnna Burt is the strategic board member who finds where an organization’s capability is locked and builds the conditions for it to perform at its ceiling. She is the person you call when the room has everything it needs to solve the problem and nobody has figured out how to unlock it yet. At Red Flag, one of the most demanding large force employment exercises in the United States Air Force, she commanded a room of the finest aviators in the world without being able to fly. Her job was not to out-perform them. It was to build the conditions in which they could perform at their ceiling. She did. That is the move she has been running for thirty-three years. She built the operational space infrastructure America depends on, the satellite networks that run GPS and financial transaction timing, the multinational command architecture coordinating allied space operations across 25 nations. She commanded every level. She ran the Space Force’s cyber, nuclear, and operations mission as its Deputy Chief. She did all of this in a domain where the adversary studies your dependencies before you have mapped them, where being wrong is not a bad quarter but an irreversible outcome, and where the question is never “what do I know?” but “what does this team know that we have not yet deployed?” That question is the most valuable thing she brings. Not the record, though the record is there. The specific diagnostic capacity to walk into any organization, find where the capability is locked, and build the conditions for it to perform at its ceiling. In environments where being wrong is not recoverable, that capacity is the difference between the organization that adapts and the one that does not. She now works with boards, C-suites, and senior teams who need someone who has been accountable for that outcome and who can help them find and unlock the capability they already have.
DeAnna Burt is the strategic board member who finds where an organization’s capability is locked and builds the conditions for it to perform at its ceiling. She is the person you call when the room has everything it needs to solve the problem and nobody has figured out how to unlock it yet. At Red Flag, one of the most demanding large force employment exercises in the United States Air Force, she commanded a room of the finest aviators in the world without being able to fly. Her job was not to out-perform them. It was to build the conditions in which they could perform at their ceiling. She did. That is the move she has been running for thirty-three years. She built the operational space infrastructure America depends on, the satellite networks that run GPS and financial transaction timing, the multinational command architecture coordinating allied space operations across 25 nations. She commanded every level. She ran the Space Force’s cyber, nuclear, and operations mission as its Deputy Chief. She did all of this in a domain where the adversary studies your dependencies before you have mapped them, where being wrong is not a bad quarter but an irreversible outcome, and where the question is never “what do I know?” but “what does this team know that we have not yet deployed?” That question is the most valuable thing she brings. Not the record, though the record is there. The specific diagnostic capacity to walk into any organization, find where the capability is locked, and build the conditions for it to perform at its ceiling. In environments where being wrong is not recoverable, that capacity is the difference between the organization that adapts and the one that does not. She now works with boards, C-suites, and senior teams who need someone who has been accountable for that outcome and who can help them find and unlock the capability they already have.
