The most dangerous dyslexic thinker is the one who can write
Give me muddled ideas with clean sentences, and I’ll show you a boardroom nodding along to nonsense. The real problem? We grade arguments by rhythm and metaphor, not by contact with reality. A charismatic explainer can invert cause and effect, stitch anecdotes into “data,” and sell constraints as strategy. Tech eats this up because eloquence feels like progress, and slides look like certainty. Here’s what nobody’s admitting: we’ve built an industry where verbal polish is a performance benchmark, not a truth test. That’s not innovation. That’s inertia.
Promise vs. reality
In theory, we celebrate first-principles thinking. In practice, we celebrate whoever can narrate a coherent story with just enough analytics to pass a cursory sniff test. The storyteller reshuffles letters in the logic until “later” becomes “now,” “maybe” becomes “signal,” and “edge case” becomes “market.” By the time anyone notices the inversion, budgets are allocated, OKRs are inked, and the slideware has a release date.
Watch any product review in a struggling org. The most articulate person explains the failure as a success in disguise: “Activation is down, but it proves our hypothesis that the power users are power-using.” Heads nod. A few “great point”s land. Nobody asks the only question that matters: if this is success, why does it feel like attrition? The answer is simple and uncomfortable. Good words anesthetize bad ideas.
Why eloquence wins
Eloquence exploits three industry-level weaknesses:
- We confuse comprehension with correctness. If I understand you easily, I assume you’re right. Clear prose reduces cognitive load, so it feels true. Not true. Just easier.
- We fetishize narrative cohesion. Humans want clean arcs — problem, insight, solution. Reality prefers jaggedness. The tidy story hides the messy data that would challenge the plan.
- We optimize for speed. Meetings demand closure. The fluent talker gives it to us — clean synthesis, a decisive slide, a line in the sand. The skeptic sounds like a delay. The skeptic loses.
This dynamic rewards the “dyslexic thinker” in the rhetorical sense: someone who can rearrange the messy letters of reality into a sentence that scans. Not all gifted communicators do this. But the ones who do become power centers. They bend roadmaps, hiring, and spend toward their narrative gravity. If you’ve ever watched a company ship a polished wrong thing with absolute confidence, you’ve seen the gravity field at work.
The offenders
Let’s name names.
Executives outsource conviction to explainers. The exec knows something’s off — latency is creeping, churn is spiking, the roadmap keeps slipping — but the deck has “momentum” and “confidence intervals,” so the risk gets reframed as a timing problem. Everyone can live with a timing problem.
Vendors exploit presentation asymmetry. The buyer’s skepticism dissolves under glossy case studies and “peer benchmarks.” A pilot gets scoped to succeed, the reference call comes pre-sanitized, and the renewal is locked before the first real metric shifts.
Evangelists turn edge anecdotes into doctrine. One heroic migration becomes a universal pattern. One open-source repo lands a few stars and suddenly “the community” demands it. A tweetstorm becomes a forecast. The cadence of the argument carries it further than its evidence.
Teams adapt to the theater. You can’t beat the smooth talker, so you join them. You upgrade the dashboards, polish the “insights,” and train yourself to say “counterintuitively” before a claim that simply contradicts the data.
None of this is malicious by default. It’s structural. The system pays out on confidence, coherence, and the spectacle of certainty. So we produce more of it.
What actually fixes it
You don’t solve rhetorical gravity by hiring even better talkers “on your side.” You solve it by changing the unit of currency from narrative to receipts.
Instrument the bet. Every big claim becomes a prediction with a date and a scoreboard. Not “this feature will improve engagement,” but “this feature will raise D30 by 2 points in this segment by December 15.” When the date hits, the claim pays out or it doesn’t. No re-baselining. No “we learned a lot.”
Separate the deck from the decision. Decisions live in a lightweight log with three columns: bet, base rate, trigger to stop. The deck can sell the dream, but the log owns the commitment. If the trigger trips, you shut it down. You don’t reshoot the movie.
Force a pre-mortem. Before we greenlight, we write the press release announcing failure. What went wrong? Which assumptions snapped? Who noticed first? If the pre-mortem is fluff, the bet isn’t ready. If it’s honest, you’ve already weakened the spell.
Mandate a demo-to-deck ratio. For every slide, show two minutes of software. Not a clickthrough fantasy — real behavior, real constraints. If the thing doesn’t exist yet, show the prototype’s ugliest part. Make the friction visible before the story hardens.
Create a red team with veto power. Not a theater review committee. A small group with the authority to block and the mandate to be annoying. Their job: attack coherence, test base rates, surface contradictory data, and flag when rhetoric outpaces reality.
Audit verbs. Ban “enable,” “accelerate,” “unlock” from roadmaps. Replace with verbs measurable in the wild: “reduces P95 by 30%,” “cuts onboarding steps from 8 to 4,” “removes three manual approvals.” If the verb can’t be timed, counted, or observed, it’s camouflage.
The uncomfortable truth
Liars don’t overrun the industry. Performers overrun it. Well, some of those performers might be liars too, The stage rewards the performance. We nod along because it feels good to believe the sentence that scans. It spares us the embarrassment of uncertainty and the grind of falsification.
Here’s the turn: eloquence is a feature, not a bug — when tethered to proof. Clear writing should make the risk legible, not invisible. It should sharpen the bet, not smother it. Keep the prose. Kill the theater.
Do that and the hierarchy flips. The smoothest talker no longer wins by default. The winning talk is the one still standing after contact with reality. And the most “dangerous” thinker in your org becomes the one who can do both: say it clean — and show the receipts.
Will Kelly is a writer, content strategist, and keen observer of the IT industry. Medium is home to his personal writing projects. His professional interests include generative AI, cloud computing, DevOps, and collaboration tools. He has written for startups, Fortune 1000 firms, and leading industry publications, including CIO and TechTarget. Follow him on X: @willkelly. You can also follow him on BlueSky: willkelly.bsky.social.
