Jargon Can Boost Performance
A shared language can reduce ambiguity and misunderstandings.
- By
- September 08, 2026
- CBR - Leadership
Before the em dashes and hollowness of AI-generated prose, language watchers’ favorite bugbear was jargon. And for good reason: It is difficult and annoying to digest words, phrases, and acronyms we don’t understand—and much worse if the writer or speaker seems to enjoy the insider status that using this language implies.
But jargon employed in the right setting can prove profitable. Research by Chicago Booth’s Ronald S. Burt, MIT’s Ray Reagans, and MIT master’s student Donald Liu finds that when a team uses shorthand unique to their tasks, they’re developing a language to describe their shared (and often unspoken) knowledge and experience. This shared language in turn boosts performance by reducing ambiguity and misunderstandings, making teams more efficient. Moreover, the research suggests that it can help when factors such as centralized networks or hierarchical leadership create communication gaps.
The findings are derived from a study the researchers conducted. They assembled 93 online teams of five participants each. Within the teams, each participant was privately shown a unique set of five abstract shapes and asked to work with their team members to discover which shape appeared on all their screens. They moved from one round to the next once they had all guessed (accurately or not) what the shared shape had been. Fifteen rounds were possible, though not all teams completed all 15 in the hour allotted.
The researchers find that language about the images converged the longer the teams worked together, but that some teams more than others developed jargon as they went—which is to say, they moved from describing the images’ shapes (“small,” “sideways,” “flat”) or projecting movement onto them (“sitting,” “kicking”) toward labeling them (“angel,” “projector,” “YMCA”). These teams were ones whose shared language developed most quickly, and a high degree of shared language was associated with strong performance, as measured by the number of team members to correctly guess each shared shape.
Jargon played a more complicated role in teams whose shared language was slow to develop. The researchers designed the study such that, in a quarter of the teams, each member could talk to any other member, while communication within the rest of the teams was filtered through one or two team leaders. Reagans, Burt, and University of Tel Aviv’s Hagay Volvovsky find in a 2023 study that shared language develops more slowly in these more centralized structures—and so it did here. But when the team leaders developed and employed jargon, performance nonetheless improved significantly.
An efficient way for teams to communicate
These insights become especially useful in companies where a few individuals coordinate communication, says Burt. For example, a company that has optimized processes in one factory and wants to spread these practices to other factories should develop language that can carry this knowledge across locations—even (and indeed especially) if the only workers who communicate across factories are the managers.
“Efficiency is not in the task; it’s in the team,” says Burt. “It comes from people talking to each other.” When that talk is limited, jargon will do the work that more connected networks can’t.
Still, Burt cautions that jargon aids efficiency, not innovation. “Jargon speeds a team down the learning curve, and so grows the bottom line. But it won’t help the top line because it won’t generate new processes.” It won’t take lessons from one area and apply them to another, creating something genuinely new.
For that, you need people (“brokers” in the language of network theory) who understand one group’s jargon—and the tacit knowledge it represents—and who can then “translate” this knowledge into words that outsiders will understand and introduce it to other settings either ahead of anyone else or just at the moment when it’s needed.
“People who are good at communicating almost never use jargon,” Burt says. “They are familiar enough with it that they find other ways of explaining.”
- Ray Reagans, Ronald S. Burt, and Donald Liu, “Jargonization, Language Development, and Team Performance,” Sociological Science, April 2026.
- Ray Reagans, Hagay Volvovsky, and Ronald S. Burt, “Shared Language in the Team Network-Performance Association: Reconciling Conflicting Views of the Network Centralization Effect on Team Performance,” Collective Intelligence, August 2023.
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