I am leaning into the glow of my monitor, the blue light etching 17 different fatigue lines into my face as I navigate the 107th slide of a presentation that has consumed 37 hours of my life. The green frame of the screen-sharing software feels like a cage. On the other end of the line, Marcus, a Senior VP whose primary skill is wearing expensive knitwear, is squinting at a graph. I can hear him tapping a pen against his mahogany desk-a rhythmic, sharp sound that mimics the heartbeat of someone in the final stages of patience. ‘I’m not sure, Diana,’ he says, his voice a smooth, low-frequency hum that manages to be both polite and devastating. ‘It just doesn’t feel strategic enough. It lacks that… wow factor. Can we circle back and make it really pop?’

Vagueness as a Defense Mechanism

This is the loop. The infinite, soul-crushing feedback loop where clarity goes to die. As a wilderness survival instructor, I’ve spent 27 years teaching people how to navigate terrain where the margin for error is measured in centimeters, not bullet points. If I told a student to ‘make their shelter more strategic’ while a storm was rolling in from the north at 47 miles per hour, they would likely be dead by dawn. In the woods, vagueness is a death sentence. In the corporate world, it’s just another Tuesday, but the attrition it causes is no less real. It is a slow-motion psychological erosion that turns vibrant, creative minds into hollowed-out compliance machines.

Just this morning, I walked into the lobby of our downtown office and pushed a door with a heavy, brass handle that quite clearly had the word ‘PULL’ engraved in a font large enough for a hawk to read from 107 feet away. I pushed it with the confidence of a woman who knows her way around a topographic map, only to be met with the unyielding resistance of a deadbolt. I stood there for 7 seconds, confused, blaming the door, before realizing my own error. That moment of misplaced certainty is exactly what happens when a manager gives vague feedback. They are pushing on a ‘pull’ door, blaming the door for not opening, and then asking the door to be more ‘innovative’ in its response.

When someone tells you to ‘make it pop,’ they aren’t actually talking about the design. They aren’t talking about the color palette or the kerning. What they are doing is admitting, subconsciously, that they have no idea what the objective is, but they are terrified that if they stop moving, someone will notice their lack of direction. Vagueness is a defense mechanism. It’s a smokescreen used by leaders who haven’t done the hard work of defining what success looks like. If they gave you a specific metric-say, increasing the click-through rate by 7 percent-they could be held accountable if that metric isn’t met. But if they tell you to ‘add more wow factor,’ they can never be wrong. If the project fails, it’s because you didn’t provide enough ‘wow.’ If it succeeds, it’s because their ‘strategic’ guidance steered the ship.

The Rejection of the Bearing

I’ve seen this play out in the 87 survival workshops I’ve led over the past decade. The students who struggle the most are the ones who try to ‘feel’ their way through a compass reading rather than trusting the math. You cannot ‘feel’ your way to 107 degrees East. You are either on the bearing or you are lost in the brush. The corporate obsession with subjective feedback is a rejection of the bearing. We have traded the hard, cold utility of precision for the warm, fuzzy safety of ambiguity. This ensures that the final product, after 17 rounds of ‘tweaking,’ is a bland compromise-a gray mush designed to offend no one and inspire even fewer.

Consider the structural integrity required in high-end architecture or functional spaces. You don’t build a glass sanctuary by asking the contractor to ‘make it feel light.’ You achieve that feeling through the rigorous application of engineering and material science. This level of intentionality is why Sola Spaces has managed to redefine the concept of an indoor-outdoor environment; they don’t rely on ‘pop,’ they rely on the exactness of the frame and the clarity of the vision. When the physical structure is sound, the ‘wow factor’ isn’t something you have to add at the end like a garnish; it is baked into the very DNA of the build. In contrast, most corporate projects are built on sand, and the ‘pop’ is just the sound of the foundation cracking.

The Terror of Precision

We are currently living through an epidemic of ‘Let’s Circle Back.’ It is a phrase that functions as a temporal loop, a way to delay the discomfort of making a definitive choice. I’ve caught myself doing it, too. When I was younger, I’d tell my trekking groups we’d ‘see how the weather feels’ before committing to a pass. I was afraid of being wrong. I was afraid that if I chose the 27-mile route and we hit a whiteout, it would be my fault. But by not choosing, I left the group in a state of nervous stasis. We weren’t resting, and we weren’t moving; we were just vibrating with anxiety. Eventually, I learned that a wrong decision made with clarity is often better than no decision wrapped in vagueness. You can correct a wrong bearing. You cannot correct a fog.

Why are we so afraid of precision? Because precision is vulnerable. To be precise is to be corrected. If I say the mountain is 7,777 feet high and it’s actually 7,747 feet, I am objectively incorrect. If I say the mountain is ‘majestic,’ I am safe forever. Organizations have become safe spaces for the majestic and dangerous places for the precise. We see this in the way we talk about ‘synergy’ and ‘disruption’-words that have been bled of all meaning through 17 years of overuse. They are the linguistic equivalent of a ‘push’ door that everyone keeps pulling on.

The ‘wow factor’ is a ghost. It is the haunting of a project by the unsaid expectations of a leader who hasn’t found their own North Star. When Marcus asks me to make the deck ‘pop,’ he is asking me to fix his own lack of vision with my sweat. He is asking me to provide the certainty he is unwilling to manufacture himself. And because I need the $777-a-day consulting fee, I go back to my desk. I change the font. I add a few more high-resolution images of mountains-the kind I’ve actually climbed, which makes the irony sting just a bit more. I spend another 7 hours chasing a ghost.

But here is the contradiction I’ve lived with: sometimes, the vagueness isn’t just laziness. Sometimes, it’s a symptom of a larger organizational terror. Companies are terrified of the ‘boring’ truth. The truth is usually that we need to sell 7 percent more units to stay afloat, or that our user interface is 27 percent slower than the competition. Those are problems with solutions. But ‘making it pop’ is an aspiration with no ceiling and no floor. It allows us to pretend we are doing something transcendental when we are really just moving pixels around a screen.

Embrace the Discomfort of Specificity

I think about that door I pushed this morning. The one that said ‘pull.’ I think about how many times I’ve been that door in a meeting-presenting a clear, functional piece of work, only to have someone push on it with their vague requirements until the hinges groan. We are all pushing and pulling at cross-purposes, fueled by a 7-day work week and enough caffeine to power a small village for 17 months. The attrition is real. It shows up in the 47 percent increase in burnout rates among creative professionals. It shows up in the way we stop caring about the 107th slide and start caring only about the ‘check-mark’ at the end of the day.

If we want to break the loop, we have to embrace the discomfort of the specific. We have to be willing to say, ‘I don’t know what “pop” means. Can you define the specific emotional or analytical response you are looking for?’ It is a dangerous question. It can lead to 7 minutes of awkward silence. But it is the only way to find the bearing. Without it, we are just hikers in the dark, spinning our compasses and hoping that the ‘wow factor’ will lead us home before the frost sets in. I’ll take a 7-degree heading over a ‘strategic feeling’ any day of the week, even if it means I have to admit I was pushing when I should have been pulling.