Henrik S. runs a leadership team of eight. They've worked together for six years. "We could finish each other's sentences," he tells me over the phone. "We had signals for everything. A look across the table that meant 'park it.' A certain tone that meant 'I'm overruling you but I'm being polite about it.'" He pauses. "We thought that meant we were aligned."
They weren't. Decisions made on Mondays were quietly undone by Wednesday. Alignment meetings produced nodding heads and divergent actions. "People would leave thinking we'd agreed," says Camilla, the team's HR lead, when I reach her separately. "Then a week later we'd discover we'd agreed on completely different things. It was maddening."
A colleague suggested the Dialogue Game — a card-based tool that takes common leadership words and traces them back to their etymological roots. Henrik was sceptical. "I thought it would be academic. Interesting, maybe, but not useful." He laughs. "I was very wrong."
The card that cracked things open was "authority." The word, it turns out, comes from a Latin root meaning "to grow" — to increase, to augment. Henrik read it aloud and the room went quiet. "I realised I'd been using authority as control," he says. "Not because I'm a bad person, but because that's what I thought it meant. To have authority meant to have the final say." Across the table, Camilla had always understood authority as cultivation — creating conditions for others to grow. Same word. Six years. Completely different practice.
"Then we got to 'trust,'" Camilla tells me. "And that's where it really hit." For one leader, trust was about reliability — do you deliver what you promise? For another, it was about vulnerability — can I show you what I don't know? "We'd been saying 'we need more trust' for months," she says. "Half of us were building accountability systems. The other half were trying to create psychological safety. We were pulling in opposite directions and blaming each other for the friction."
I ask what made the etymology approach different from just talking it out. Henrik thinks about it. "Nobody was being accused of anything. The word carried the history. It wasn't me saying 'you misunderstand trust' — it was both of us looking at the same root and realising we'd each taken a different branch. There's no defensiveness in that. It's just a discovery."
The session didn't produce a glossary or a values poster. "What it gave us," says Camilla, "was a habit. Now, before we use a big word in a meeting, someone will stop and say, 'When I say ownership, I mean the freedom to decide without checking. Is that what you mean?' It takes five seconds. It's saved us hours."
The card that landed hardest was "responsibility." One leader had always carried it as weight — obligation, burden, the thing you can't put down. Another experienced it as privilege — being trusted enough to hold something that matters. "When she said that out loud," Henrik recalls, "I could see the whole room shift. It wasn't vocabulary anymore. It was empathy. Built on precision, not feelings."
Three months later, I check in with Henrik. Has it stuck? "Last week," he says, "we were arguing about a restructuring plan. Someone stopped and said, 'Wait — are we even talking about the same thing when we say flexibility?' And we weren't. But this time we caught it in ten minutes instead of losing three weeks to it." He sounds genuinely relieved. "The dangerous misunderstandings aren't between strangers. They're between people who've known each other long enough to stop asking."