Having a Leadership Vocab

I dumped a bunch of our internal leadership training into AI, found our "leadership vocabulary":

These come from the biweekly Sagan Emerging Leaders training that I do with a bunch of our team and have been for the last two or three years.

It's strange to see things we've talked about reflected back in this format!

The Sagan Leadership Language

The shorthand that makes the culture portable. New leaders should recognize all of it.

BLUF — bottom line up front.

NSTR — "nothing significant to report"; a perfect brief.

The yellow zone — challenged, not breaking. Red = breaking; green = coasting and needs weight.

Pirate ship vs. big company — speed, standards, focus vs. natural organizational drift.

The monkey — the next move on a problem.

Monkey vomit — tagging four managers at once.

The juggling monkey vs. the pedestal — the hard core of the task vs. the comfortable visible scaffolding.

River-proofing — writing expectations so clearly nobody can play dumb.

The meta-conversation — the third-offense talk about broken commitments, no longer about the task.

The leash — earned autonomy; it lengthens, and eventually you cut it.

Left and right limits — constraints plus comeback triggers.

The directed telescope — firsthand information gathering that respects the chain of command.

Go to gemba — go where the work happens.

Fingerspitzengefühl — fingertip feel for the organization.

Catching features — deadlines that surface problems ("if you hit the river, you went too far").

The relationship bank account — deposits fund withdrawals.

Ruinous empathy — caring so much you can't tell the truth.

The hat — deliberately switching personas ("It's not Billy anymore. It's Sergeant.").

Frame / expert frame / power frame — whose worldview governs the interaction; "who's reacting to who."

Waiter vs. sommelier — facts and administration vs. story, pairing, and conviction.

Barnacles — accumulated digital inventory (dead dashboards, stale SOPs, zombie meetings).

The stoplight — red/yellow/green AI governance by stakes.

Middle-to-middle — human context in, AI middle, human ownership out.

Raw-dogging AI — shipping unchecked output.

Boneless, skinless chicken — technically edible, flavorless AI content.

B-minus ceiling — AI lifts the floor; humans own B-to-A.

Cables — Sagan's written broadcast format for decisions and learnings.

Do-not-do list — the standing subtraction artifact.

"You got this" — delegation plus intervention by exception.

"Bad news early is good news" — the anti-surprise doctrine.

Privately famous — team members visible enough that customers arrive pre-sold.

Saturation learning — culture transfer by proximity to decisions, the reason this cohort exists.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon