When assumptions shape the language we use
Humans are meaning-making machines.
We look for patterns, infer intent, and fill in the gaps rather instinctively. From finding shapes in clouds to assigning motive and intent to silence, we rarely experience the world as neutral, opinion-free observers.
Organisations merely amplify this tendency.
Inside a business, meaning is formed long before the strategy is finalised. People will listen for emphasis, tone, language, notice what is repeated, and draw conclusions from what has been left unsaid. Those interpretations rarely stay internal.
These interpretations also don’t stop at leadership intent. They extend outwards. In the absence of clear data, organisations begin to infer and default to assumptions about what customers must think, want, or tolerate.
This naturally goes on to shape the external messaging. From what feels safe to say, what feels risky to promise, and how confidently the organisation shows up in front of customers.
This is why language shapes behaviour long before the strategy does. And why customers often sense any confusion, caution or contradiction before a company is able to consciously recognise it itself.
The stories businesses tell themselves
Every organisation will carry a story about who it is, how it works, and what is possible. Often, these are not committed to paper, but rather form and evolve through conversational experience, habit and repetition.
Alongside that sits an internal narrative about the market and customers it serves. A working understanding that emerges as teams try to make sense of complicated landscapes while continuing to move forward.
Over time, reasonable assumptions and inferences harden. What began as interpretation takes hold and starts behaving like fact. Assumptions around what customers are presumed to value, fear, or resist stop being questioned, actively tested or understood, and begin to guide decisions by default.
The risk here is not that these narratives exist, but that they suppress curiosity.
When this curiosity is suppressed, organisations don’t just misunderstand their markets but begin to lose the ability to notice when those markets subtly shift.
Try asking your team
Which beliefs about our market are being reinforced through internal conversations, rather than tested and validated through direct external evidence?
If we separated what we know from what we assume about our market and our customers, how much would genuinely stay in the “know” column?
Where has internal dialogue quietly replaced direct understanding of the market?
How these stories shape what customers hear
What sounds generic or cautious externally often made sense internally at the time. A group of capable people, working with imperfect information, interpreting data, aligning perspectives and trying to set a sensible direction.
Similar organisations tend to arrive at similar conclusions. They look to familiar competitors, adopt comparable language, and settle on positioning that feels safe and defensible in context.
The result is messaging that is shaped more by internal consensus than by fresh insight or creativity. Similar language, cautious positioning, and blurred distinctiveness that makes it at times hard for customers to get what you do.
However, language shaped by internal assumptions often stops matching the way customers understand their own world much sooner than you would expect. Familiar phrases and industry shorthand may creep into messaging, while customers are using a different language entirely to describe their problems, priorities, and pressures.
The gap naturally widens, leaving customers to interpret meaning, translate relevance and piece together the value for themselves. The more customers have to interpret, the less value they tend to see.
This is how internal assumptions, left untested, can easily turn into an external disconnect.
Try asking your team
Where does our customer-facing language sound cautious or generic because of what we assume about the market?
If customers judged our understanding of the market from our messaging alone, what would they assume we believe about them?
What do customers have to decode or work out for themselves in our language before they can really understand our value?
The impact of untested assumptions
Every organisation believes that it understands its market.
Far fewer than you might expect, however, regularly test whether the language they use still reflects how customers see themselves. Whether their internal assumptions and interpretations still hold true. Or whether internal lingo and ways of thinking have unwittingly leaked into the market.
When that happens, language starts serving the organisation more than the customer. Messaging that may make sense internally, requires translation, interpretation and gap filling.
When customers have to work to understand your language and the meaning it has to them, value is already being lost. Customers will notice the gap long before the business does.
The real question, then, is not whether your messaging is clear, but whether it is grounded in understanding rather than assumption. Because progress in the market rarely stalls through a lack of effort. It stalls when meaning and value stop being shared.
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