I have been paying attention to the words we use in this industry. And I keep noticing the same thing: the ones we rely on the most are the ones that mean the least.
Not because they were always empty. Most of them started as precise descriptions of something real, something that mattered enough to need a name. But somewhere between the original meaning and the LinkedIn post, the pitch deck, the annual report, the meaning leaked out and nobody bothered to refill it.
Some of these words were emptied by marketing. Others got buried by politics, or worn down by people who kept using them without understanding what it cost to build them in the first place. This is not nostalgia. I am not arguing that things were better before. I am arguing that when we lose the words, we lose the ability to describe what still matters. And that makes it harder to live well today, not just to plan for a better tomorrow.
Skinheads
Most people hear this word and picture hate. I did too, until I met Evelyn Kutschera.
Evelyn is a photographer and researcher at the University of Gloucestershire who has spent years documenting skinhead culture. The real one. She stayed at our Airbnb in London and ended up spending more time hanging out with us than going out in the city. She is warm, sharp, and one of those people who makes you rethink things you thought you already understood.
What she taught me is that skinheads started as a working-class subculture in 1960s London. Jamaican rude boys and English working kids sharing music, fashion, and streets. Ska, reggae, Doc Martens, Fred Perry. A culture built on solidarity across racial lines — which is almost the exact opposite of what the word conjures now.
Extremists adopted the look. The media ran with the image. Within a generation, the word became synonymous with something its founders would not recognise. Nobody depreciated that word by accident. It was taken, repurposed, and never given back.
Rhetoric
In first-century Rome, Quintilian defined rhetoric as the art of a good person speaking well. Think about that for a moment. Not spin. Not manipulation. The disciplined practice of making a clear argument with integrity. It was considered one of the highest intellectual skills a person could develop.
Now when a journalist says "that is just rhetoric," they mean the opposite. They mean empty words. Noise designed to distract rather than persuade.
We lost a word that described something we desperately need more of — the ability to communicate with clarity and purpose — and replaced it with nothing.
Sustainability
Try counting how many times you see this word in a single planning application. I stopped counting a while ago.
Sustainability used to mean a system that gives back more than it takes. A way of operating that can endure, genuinely, across generations. Now entire industries use "sustainable" to describe processes that are marginally less destructive than they were five years ago. That is not sustainability. That is marketing with a conscience, and I think most people in the room know the difference even if nobody says it out loud.
The word lost its edge because it became profitable to say it without meaning it.
Innovation
This one is personal, because it sits at the centre of my work and I have watched it get hollowed out in real time.
Innovation should describe something that changes how we operate. A genuine shift in practice, capability, or value. Instead, a new colour palette is innovation. A software update is innovation. A meeting about future meetings is an innovation workshop. (I wish I were exaggerating.)
Teams now avoid the word. They know what follows when someone senior says "we need to innovate." A brainstorm, a wall full of sticky notes, and nothing that changes on Monday morning. Innovation became a gimmick because we stopped asking the harder question: what happens after the idea?
Disruptive
Every startup calls itself disruptive now. Every product launch. The word gets thrown around boardrooms like a compliment, without anyone asking the questions that used to come attached to it: disruptive to what? At what cost? With what evidence?
Real disruption has casualties. It changes markets, displaces workers, redistributes power. Calling an untested idea disruptive is not brave, it is just reckless dressed up in ambition. And when nobody assesses the negative impact before scaling, "disruptive" ends up meaning something closer to "we did not think it through."
Influencer
This is maybe the saddest one on the list.
Influence used to be earned over decades. Through credibility, consistency, and demonstrated expertise that other people trusted enough to follow. Now it is a job title you give yourself after reaching a follower count. The word describes a distribution channel, not a person of substance. Someone who sells attention, not insight.
The original meaning — someone whose judgement carries weight because they earned it through years of doing the work — barely exists in the public vocabulary anymore. I think we are poorer for that.
Conservative
This one will make some people uncomfortable. Good.
Conservative comes from the Latin conservare. To preserve. To keep whole. It described the instinct to protect what works, to carry forward customs and systems that a society tested over generations. That instinct is not backwards. It is deeply practical. There is nothing wrong with recognising that some old ideas worked, and that new technology might give them new purpose rather than replace them entirely.
But the word got swallowed by politics. It became a tribal identity, a label that signals who you vote for rather than how you think. And now anyone who suggests that maybe some traditions are worth keeping gets placed on a side of a debate they never intended to join.
We did not just depreciate the word. We made the idea behind it almost impossible to express without being misunderstood.
Woke
And here is the mirror image.
"Woke" started in African American communities as a call to stay alert. To notice injustice. To not sleepwalk through systems designed to exclude. That was a good word. A necessary one.
Then it became a corporate badge. Then a political weapon. One side used it to signal virtue without action, the other used it to dismiss any concern about fairness as overreach. Now "woke" means whatever the person using it needs it to mean. A word that once asked people to pay attention became a word people use to stop listening.
I am not sure there is a better example of how language gets destroyed from both directions at once.
Craft
Craft used to mean years of deliberate practice. A cabinetmaker, a stonemason, a relojoeiro (my grandmother would have used the Portuguese word). Someone who understood their material so deeply that the work itself carried authority you could see and feel.
Now? Craft beer produced at industrial scale. Craft coffee from a capsule. Craft pizza, frozen. The word got stuck onto so many mass-produced products with rustic labels that it barely registers anymore.
The original idea — that deep skill in a discipline has a value that cannot be shortcut — is one of the most important concepts we could bring back. Especially now, when technology makes shortcuts easier than ever and the temptation to take them is constant.
The pattern
Each of these words followed the same path, and I think that is the thing worth paying attention to. Something real was observed. A word was created to describe it. The word gained cultural currency. Then someone figured out that currency could be extracted, or weaponised, or both.
And there will always be people who say it is better this way. Language evolves. Meanings shift. Move on.
They are not wrong about the mechanics. Language does change. But there is a difference between a word that evolves naturally and a word that gets stripped for parts. And I think most of us can tell the difference when we see it, even if we have stopped pointing it out.
Why this matters now
I am not making an argument for going backwards. I am making an argument for paying attention to what we are losing while we rush forward.
We have become very good at talking about the future. Every strategy is about tomorrow, every pitch is about what comes next, every conference is about the world that is coming. But nobody lives in the future. We live today. And the quality of today depends on whether we can describe what matters with enough precision to actually act on it.
When the words we use to talk about integrity, craft, preservation, awareness, and genuine progress all mean nothing, we do not just have a communication problem. We have a decision-making problem. You cannot fund what you cannot name. You cannot protect what you cannot describe. And you cannot build anything real on language that has been hollowed out from the inside.
Why I chose "Real Value"
I could have called it innovation consulting. I could have said we help organisations be more sustainable, or more disruptive, or more innovative. But those words have been borrowed too many times by people who did not intend to return them.
Real Value is specific. It means outcomes that can be validated, decisions that hold up under scrutiny, ideas tested before they are scaled. Not a slogan. A discipline.
Old concepts, applied with new tools, measured against what actually works today. Not what sounds good in a pitch about tomorrow.
When the language around us gets diluted, precision is not just a preference. It becomes a competitive advantage.
A question worth sitting with
How many more words will we lose before we start protecting the ones that still mean something?
I do not have the answer. But I think the question matters more than most of us are willing to admit.
Because every time we use a word we do not mean, we make it harder for the next person who does.