Our Words are Our Infrastructure

NOMAD in action

One of the dynamics that keeps HR interesting is how important the way we use language is. I think it’s one of the reasons there are so many people in HR who slid over from a PR, Comms, or Marketing background. I definitely attribute it as the reason that I often feel like I have a Marketing soul attached to my HR brain.

I’ve been talking about my NOMAD framework. I wanted to show you with a real problem what it looks like to use this in action. What follows is a scenario and a summary of my own conclusions from using this framework and then a step-by-step walkthrough of how I got there using NOMAD.

The overview and the conclusion I reached (the shorter version)

Shared language matters. It gives us credibility, helps us collaborate. With the rise of the HR Business Partner and the Chief HR Officer, and the move towards HR as a strategic function rather than a tactical / executional function, we’ve also spent years building a vocabulary that lets us align with legal, finance, and senior leadership.

Somewhere in the midst of making sure we belong in those rooms, we’ve lost sight of our bigger role. We are the translators between the frontline and the strategic decision makers with their slide decks, SAT-word laden memos, and investor-facing announcements. If we speak a completely different language than the people we are trying to serve, then we don’t just have a communications issue….we have an accessibility issue, and ultimately an efficiency issue.

When HR content is filled with jargon, it doesn’t just alienate. It becomes invisible….it becomes useless. Harsh? Stick with me. Right now, all of that language we’ve spent hours or days perfecting, that’s been through multiple review committees? It’s what we are seeding our knowledge bases with, it’s the answers our chatbots are relying on, it’s what the search bar is searching through. That search is driven either directly by keywords or by AI analysis.

AI isn’t magic and employees don’t think in keywords. Our knowledge base is only as effective as what the search function understands….and most employees and frontline managers don’t type “progressive discipline pathways” into the search bar. They type “Can I get fired for being late.”

If we don’t speak the same language of our employees, our hard work is exactly what I said earlier…..useless. We aren’t just failing at communications, we are failing at design. This is exactly why plain language is a systems issue.

This shows up everywhere, including in how we gather requirements. Every time we build a system that reflects how we wish our processes worked instead of how they actually work we widen that gap.

One thing we could (and should) do is fix some of our bad habits around jargon. But the other solution is when we are looking at software a requirement might be: “The software must recognize HR terminology and translate it into everyday language employees actually use, and vice versa.”

That’s not just selecting a feature, it’s intentionally designing a bridge.

Using NOMAD (the longer version)

N — Notice Assumptions

At first glance, the assumption seemed small and harmless:

“Of course we use professional language—it’s just how we do things in HR.”

But when I followed that thread, I found deeper, more embedded assumptions:

• That credibility is built through formality

• That employees should learn to speak our language

• That plain language isn’t “strategic”

• That clarity and professionalism are somehow opposites

And the big underlying assumption nobody was looking at?

That if something is documented, it’s findable.

Spoiler: it’s not.

This was the moment I realized we were optimizing our documents for alignment with leadership… not for discoverability by the people who actually need them.

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O — Observe Reality

So I tested it.

I went into our HR knowledge base and typed the kind of question a real person might ask:

“Can I get fired for being late?”

The search came up empty.

Then I tried a few more:

• “Calling out sick too much”

• “Change my name after getting married”

• “Boss won’t approve my PTO”

What came back wasn’t wrong. But it also wasn’t right.
The results were written in HR-ese—loaded with jargon, hidden behind layers of links, or just plain hard to understand.

I watched the system perform exactly as it was designed…
And fail the person it was supposed to serve.

That’s when it hit me:
Our words aren’t just what we say, they’re the architecture of our systems.

And anyone who I’ve managed to keep standing still for long enough talking about geeky work stuff knows that I firmly believe that our systems and processes are how we keep our promises. When our words, our systems, are working against what we say we value, it’s a problem.

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M — Make Friends

This part didn’t start with the chatbot.

It started years ago.

It started with all the moments I listened, asked questions, built trust, without an agenda.
It started with hallway chats, side-channel Teams messages, late-night problem-solving sessions that weren’t “mine” to solve.

When it came time to understand what was broken,
I didn’t have to guess who to talk to. I already knew.

I had relationships with the service desk rep who fields the same five confused questions every day.
With multiple people working in frontline roles.
With the people closest to the pain—and the people with the power to change it.

Because that’s the work before the work.
That’s what lets you move fast and move right.
When you’ve made real friends across the system,
you don’t have to beg for insight—you just ask.

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A — Ask to Validate

This is where I got clear—not just about the problem, but about what mattered to me.

I didn’t have the authority to change the chatbot.
I wasn’t the product owner.
I wasn’t leading the project.
But I could test my assumptions.

So I started asking questions:

“What would you actually type if you were looking for this?”
“What words confuse you in our policies?”
“If this didn’t exist yet, how would you describe what you needed?”

Their answers didn’t match what was written.
But they matched each other.

I rewrote one article in plain language.
Not because I was told to—but because I had to see what would happen.

I shared it with someone outside HR:

“Does this feel clear? Could you find this if you needed it?”

That small validation didn’t give me power over the system—
but it did give me conviction.

Because the truth is, I couldn’t force a change.
But I could name what I saw.

And what I saw was this:

The language we use in HR isn’t neutral.
When it’s built to impress executives but fails the people it’s meant to serve, it’s not just ineffective. It’s unjust.

We don’t exist to sound smart.
We exist to make work better.
And that starts with making ourselves understandable.

That’s the outcome of this step, not a technical solution, but a fire lit under me to keep calling it out.

Because if our language alienates more than it empowers, it’s not strategy.
It’s ego.
And I think we can do better than that.

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D — Dip In

I couldn’t change the system.
But I could get closer to it.

So I dipped in.

I rewrote one article. I tested search terms.
I paid attention to where people got stuck.
But I didn’t stop there.

I went to HR tech conferences.
I listened to panels and sat in on vendor demos.
I had coffee chats with product managers and content strategists and folks building bots and workflows.
I asked a million questions—not to critique, but to understand.

I watched the tension between what tech could do and what orgs were actually using it for.
I noticed how often language—just plain language—was the friction point.

And even though I wasn’t the decision-maker, the more I dipped in, the more I saw.
The more I saw, the more I cared.
The more I cared, the more I realized this wasn’t a content problem.
It was a philosophy problem.

Because dipping in isn’t just about collecting insights.
It’s about letting the insights change you.

I didn’t walk away with a system redesign.
I walked away with a point of view.

That the words we use should serve the people—not elevate our egos.
That clarity is a form of care.
That HR isn’t just part of the system—it shapes it.
And it’s time we start acting like it.

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Wrap-up: Language isn’t just what we say, it’s how we build

This wasn’t some big, dramatic transformation story. No chatbot got rebuilt, no major system overhaul happened. It’s not flashy, there’s no KPI I can attach to it. But it did impact me, what I saw, what I pay attention to, and in how I understand the role of language in the systems we build.

NOMAD isn’t just a framework I created to sound clever. It’s the synthesis of the tools I reach for when something doesn’t feel right, but I’m not sure why yet. When I can sense something before it shows up in the data.

It gives me a way to pause, systematically understand the friction I’m feeling, and to start moving….even when I don’t have formal authority, a clear mandate, or a roadmap. It’s a way to learn from the system by getting closer to it, instead of staying stuck in my assumptions.

It’s crystallized curiosity.

What working through this made painfully clear to me is that the language we use in HR isn’t neutral. We’ve become so good at aligning with legal, finance, and leadership that we’ve left behind the service we are meant to deliver. When our language doesn’t match that of the people who use the systems we create, when it feels confusing, or foreign, or overpolished….then what we’ve built becomes unusable. All of that documentation, all of that structure, all of that knowledge, all of that work is squandered, it’s invisible.

I realized that the language we use in HR isn’t just a delivery vehicle for policies or programs. It is part of the system. And if our language alienates more than it serves, then our systems are failing too. I didn’t have the authority to fix it. But I had eyes. I had questions. And I had a voice.

Experiences like this is part of why, a year ago, I changed my headline on LinkedIn to “HR Philosopher.” Not because it’s a job title, but because it was the most honest answer I had to the question “what are you here to do?”

I’m not just here to implement strategy. I’m here to ask better questions about the systems we’ve built, the assumptions we hold, and the tradeoffs we quietly accept. I’m here to translate what gets lost in the space between policy and people. I’m here to make visible the things we’ve stopped noticing. To be a mirror. A thought partner……and yes, sometimes that person who holds a microphone up to the quiet part, because that’s how change happens. But I’m always, always here in service to making work, and the systems that shape it, a little more human. And I write and speak because I know that’s true of so many of my HR counterparts as well.

The little things that we so often overlook can be the biggest clues to what needs to change. So I’m sharing with all of you, so you too can be NOMADs. You can see the system, name the flaws, care about how the system impacts the humans…..and that’s where every better system begins.

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