The Bird Has a Name. So What?
On Feynman, False Fluency, and Why Most GTM Doesn’t Work
“You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're done, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places and what they call it. Now,” he said, “let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing.”
— Richard Feynman, recalling his interaction with his father.
That’s it. That’s the whole point.
You can call it a brown-throated thrush in English.
Zorzal de garganta parda in Spanish.
Grive à gorge brune in French.
ツグミ (tsugumi) in Japanese.
You can catalogue it. Taxonomize it. Colour-code it on a slide.
But you still won’t know how it behaves.
How it feeds. Why it hops before it flies.
You won’t know how it works.
You’ll just know what people call it.
The Corporate Version of This? It’s Everywhere.
This is everywhere. In fact, might be the default mode in financial services and in consulting decks.
It sounds like:
- "Risk-adjusted return on capital across the segmented client base."
- "Advisor enablement reimagined as an omni-channel engagement framework."
- "We’ve designed a go-to-market strategy calibrated to firm personas."
It’s fluent. Impressive. Abstract.
But ask a basic question,
“What’s actually happening?”
and you’ll usually hit a wall.
The slide has language.
But the system has no logic.
Naming Isn’t Knowing
This is the heart of it.
We’ve confused labels with leverage.
We’ve confused fluency with insight.
And we’ve built entire functions around this confusion.
We name stages.
We define personas.
We measure activity.
But we don’t watch behaviour.
We don’t track causality.
We don’t build systems that reflect how things actually move, only how we talk about them.
It’s expensive theater.
Consultant Speak Is Not Strategy, and Marketing Isn’t Innocent Either
Consulting language, and its glorification has made this worse.
The more abstract the term, the safer it feels to say.
You’ll hear phrases like:
- "At the treetop level..."
- "Let’s frame it from a strategic altitude..."
- "We’ll ladder this into a north star activation pathway..."
It’s all altitude. No architecture.
And marketing? Marketing might be the grandmaster of this.
- “We’re activating brand synergies across the ecosystem.”
- “This campaign is about long-term equity, not immediate attribution.”
- “We’re nurturing future-state intent via ambient storytelling.”
- “It’s not measurable in isolation, but it moves the perception delta.”
- “We’re building downstream lift via upstream narrative architecture.”
What? Seriously?
None of that means anything.
It’s a vibe, not a system.
I have watched Marketing became the art of talking about impact without proving it.
Of storytelling about storytelling.
Of hiding behind latency, ambiguity, and sentiment scores that don’t link to action.
If you can’t show what changed, if you can’t trace it back to behaviour,
you’ve just renamed the bird and launched a campaign about how rare it is.
Let’s Be Precise: Language Isn’t the Problem. Lazy Language Is.
It’s important to be clear here.
Language matters.
It matters a lot.
In fact, it’s everything; it’s how we think, how we design, how we make decisions.
But here’s the thing:
Good language is hard.
Plain language, even harder.
Saying something simply doesn’t mean you’ve dumbed it down.
It means you’ve done the work to understand it well enough to explain it.
And sometimes, even plain words are hard to grasp.
That’s okay. That’s not a flaw.
Because at least now, the difficulty is real. It’s not buried in metaphor or jargon. It’s not hidden behind “brand equity” or “north star activations.”
It’s right there. In front of you. Waiting to be understood.
But - and this is the part most people skip - you still have to do the work.
- You have to unlearn the performance.
- You have to sit with the confusion.
- You have to roll up your sleeves, ask questions, map it out.
- You have to learn the system.
There’s no shortcut.
Only the choice to be clear about the work, or to cover it up.
What It Means to Understand
Feynman’s father didn’t ask him to sound smart.
He asked him to pay attention.
In our world, that means:
- Reading beyond the executive summary
- Challenging assumptions inside your own team
- Following signals through the system, not just labelling them
- Testing: what happens if we remove this step? this field? this message?
Real understanding is uncomfortable.
It exposes what’s not working.
It produces clarity.
The test is simple: If you can’t explain how it works without the name,
you don’t understand it.
You can name the bird in five languages.
Dress it up. Chart it. Workshop it.
If it doesn’t fly, it doesn’t fly.
And no amount of naming will make it lift.
Call it what you want.
If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.
And the system knows, even if the slide doesn’t.
KB