When a product is floundering, the instinct is to add — more features, more process, more meetings to diagnose the meetings. The medieval Jain philosopher Nagarjuna (later developed in Madhyamaka Buddhist logic) identified something useful here: most concepts we treat as positive entities are actually relational negations. A 'clear roadmap' isn't a thing you build — it's what remains when you've removed competing claims on priority. Mencius, the Confucian thinker often overshadowed by Confucius himself, argued similarly that moral clarity in leadership isn't cultivated through accumulation of virtue-talk, but through clearing away what he called 'sprouts that have been trampled' — the small distortions introduced by incentives, ego, and social performance. Together they suggest a specific diagnostic move: when your team keeps circling the same problem without resolution, the bottleneck is rarely missing information. It's usually a concept that has been allowed to float free of any real referent — a goal that sounds shared but means four different things to four different people. Today, find one word your team uses constantly — 'alignment,' 'ownership,' 'impact' — and ask what specific, observable action it actually refers to. If nobody can answer in under ten seconds, that word is where the drag lives.

Think of a recent decision that felt stuck for longer than it should have. What was the key term everyone was using — and did you ever actually define what it pointed to?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Logic / Confucian Philosophy (Mencius) — Mencius (Mengzi, c. 4th century BCE)