Confucius spent years advising rulers who ignored him, then wrote nothing down himself — everything we have comes from students reconstructing conversations decades after his death. What survived wasn't a system. It was a disposition: the practice he called *zhengming*, the rectification of names, which insisted that before you can govern well, you must call things by their actual names. A feature is not a product. Velocity is not progress. User satisfaction is not user value. The Confucian argument — developed most precisely in the *Analects*, Book 13 — is that misnamed things produce misaligned actions, and misaligned actions compound quietly until they become institutional. For a PM, this hits somewhere specific: roadmap conversations routinely use words like 'priority,' 'done,' and 'customer need' as if everyone in the room shares a definition. They don't. The practical discipline isn't to write a glossary. It's to pause, when a meeting starts drifting, and ask which word in the sentence everyone just nodded at means something different to each person present.

In the last sprint or planning cycle, which word did your team use constantly — 'done,' 'priority,' 'aligned,' 'user need' — that you now suspect meant different things to different people in the room?

Drawing from Confucianism — Confucius (Analects, Book 13, c. 5th century BCE)