THE INVISIBLE VIOLENCE OF CORPORATE COMMUNICATION

There is a peculiar form of violence that does not manifest in shouts or explicit prohibitions. It dwells in the space between what was said and what should have been understood. It resides in the distance between the transmitted message and the lived experience of the receiver. It leaves no visible marks, generates no labor lawsuits, does not appear in climate surveys — and precisely because of that, it perpetuates itself with terrifying efficiency in contemporary corporate structures.
We are talking about the communicational architecture that functions as a selection device: it determines who belongs and who is merely passing through, who was considered in the design of the message and who will need to make additional cognitive effort to decode what, for others, flows with disconcerting naturalness. The issue is not semantic. It is existential. Because every linguistic choice carries with it an implicit ontology — a view about who deserves to be considered a legitimate interlocutor and who figures merely as an accidental addressee.
When an organization structures its communicational systems, it is not simply defining information transmission protocols. It is, fundamentally, delimiting boundaries of belonging. It is inscribing — in words, syntactic structures, formats, and undeclared assumptions — a hierarchy of human relevances. And the most disturbing part: it often does this without malicious intent, merely reproducing cultural automatisms that have never been subjected to reflective scrutiny.
Consider the naturalness with which corporations reproduce communicational patterns that presuppose an ideal addressee: someone with linear available time, who processes information in complex visual formats, who masters specific corporate codes, who has uninterrupted professional trajectories, who recognizes themselves in normative familiar examples, who experiences the world through neurological parameters considered “standard.” This ghostly addressee — who rarely corresponds to the real diversity of people composing the organization — becomes the invisible mold from which all communication is structured.
What happens, then, to those who do not fit this mold? They receive the message, but along with it they also receive a parallel, unverbalized yet perfectly comprehensible message: you were not considered when this was built. Your specific existence, your particular needs, your singular modes of processing information were not on the horizon of whoever designed this system. You may participate, but always as guests who must adapt to the house codes — never as legitimate inhabitants whose specificities shape the very architecture of the space.
When Exclusion Happens Without Announcement: Real Cases of Structural Invisibility
This dynamic manifests in surprisingly subtle, everyday ways. Take the case of Renata, an engineer with fifteen years of experience in network infrastructure, recently diagnosed with ADHD. She receives the announcement about changes in project approval processes: eight pages of running text, sent at 6:23 PM on a Friday, with five links to complementary documents that reference previous ones. There is no executive summary. No clear visual structure. No information hierarchy. For Renata, that is not merely a dense email — it is a cognitive marathon that will consume double the time it would for neurotypical colleagues, leaving her exhausted and with the persistent feeling that she “should be able to process this faster.”
The technical message arrived. The information is there. Formally, everyone was communicated to. Informally, Renata received another message: her specific mode of processing information was not considered relevant enough to influence how this communication was structured.
Or consider the succession program application form at a multinational. Among the mandatory questions: “spouse’s name,” “number of children,” “father’s and mother’s education level.” For Marcelo, a competent professional in a same-sex relationship without children, raised by his grandmother after parental abandonment, the form does not merely collect data — it communicates that his existential configuration is a statistical deviation that must be accommodated in fields not designed with stories like his in mind. He fills it out, adapts, invents answers that fit the available boxes. Technically, he participated in the process. Symbolically, he was informed that he had to contort himself to fit.
Operations manager Laura experiences another facet of this structural exclusion. A single mother of three children, she works in shifts because she needs to be present at school pickup times. When the board announces the new leadership program — with weekly in-person meetings at 7 PM and an intensive weekend immersion module — the formal message is “investment in talent development.” The message Laura receives is different: “this program was designed for those with domestic structures that allow nighttime and weekend absences.” She could, technically, “get organized.” She could ask for favors, hire temporary caregivers, juggle. She could — and probably will, at disproportionate emotional and financial cost. What she cannot do is change the fact that her reality was not on the horizon of whoever designed the access conditions for that opportunity.
These are not extreme cases. They are everyday manifestations of how communicational and procedural systems operate silent exclusions through undeclared assumptions about who the “standard” professional deserving consideration in organizational design is.
Jargon as Capital: When Complicating Becomes a Distinction Strategy
Here lies one of the most perverse dynamics of contemporary corporate communication: the deliberate transformation of clarity into hermeticism, of accessibility into exclusion.
Observe the proliferation of imported expressions that colonize Brazilian corporate environments with epidemic speed: “let’s do a deep dive into the core business for delivery of outcomes aligned with stakeholders, ensuring an agile mindset and data-driven approach at the critical touchpoint of this transformation journey.” Pause. Breathe. Try translating that for someone who has worked twenty years at the same company, with fundamental contributions, yet without having undergone the linguistic baptism of business schools or global consultancies.
What just happened? A phrase that could mean “let’s deeply analyze our main activity to deliver results aligned with the people involved, maintaining agility and data-based decisions at the crucial moment of this change” was turned into restricted code. And this code is not neutral. It functions as an access password. As a marker of belonging to a certain professional caste. As a signal that you possess the adequate cultural capital to circulate in the circles where decisions actually happen.
The defense of unnecessary complexity as a sign of sophistication actually reveals a sophisticated mechanism of social distinction transplanted into cognitive capitalism. Whoever masters the hermetic code signals elevated cultural capital and, therefore, legitimacy to occupy decision-making positions. Whoever stumbles over it, even possessing deep technical expertise or valuable experience, is silently reclassified as “outdated,” “resistant to change,” or “having difficulty keeping up with transformations.”
See the emblematic case of Roberto, a logistics specialist with three decades of operational experience, responsible for optimizations that saved the company millions. When new executives arrive talking about “cross-functional synergy to unlock efficiencies through quick wins in the pipeline of priority initiatives,” Roberto does not understand that they are proposing exactly what he has been doing for years with different vocabulary. He perceives, with growing discomfort, that his direct language — “let’s integrate the areas to eliminate waste and start with the most important quick improvements” — sounds outdated, insufficiently sophisticated, inadequate for the rooms where strategy is discussed.
The violence here is not in Roberto not understanding English terms. It is in turning mastery of those terms into a tacit prerequisite for being taken seriously, even when the substance of the contribution is identical. It is in using language as a filter that separates those who “think strategically” (read: speak the correct jargon) from those who are “too operational” (read: use clear Portuguese).
This phenomenon intensifies in meetings where linguistic performance replaces conceptual clarity. Someone presents a project saying they will “potencialize brand awareness in the target through omnichannel experience with focus on customer centricity and leveraging digital assets to maximize engagement.” Everyone nods. No one asks “what, exactly, are you going to do?” Because asking would be admitting they do not master the code. It would expose them as someone who needs translation. It would signal they do not belong to the circle of those who naturally speak this globalized management lingua franca.
And so, entire meetings occur where no one fully understands what is being said, no one dares ask for clarification, and everyone leaves with a diffuse feeling that they understood enough — or that the failure to fully comprehend is a personal deficiency, not a communication problem. Clarity is sacrificed on the altar of linguistic performativity. And the cost? Decisions based on misunderstandings, superficial alignments, executions that diverge from intent because no one truly understood what was proposed beneath the layers of industrialized jargon.
The Banalization of Suffering: When Diagnoses Become Disposable Adjectives
But there is an even more insidious dimension in this dynamic: the banalization of suffering through everyday language. When clinical diagnoses become adjectives for stress — “I’m so OCD about this organization,” “this deadline is making me bipolar,” “I need meds to survive this meeting,” “only an autistic person wouldn’t catch that hint” — a double violence operates.
First, it trivializes real experiences of suffering, turning complex conditions into disposable figures of speech. Second, it reinforces the stigma that these conditions are only acceptable when metaphorized — that is, when they are not real.
Marina experiences this daily. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder five years ago, she manages the condition rigorously and is a high-performance professional in her field. When she hears colleagues say “this change in direction left me bipolar” to describe administrative indecision, or “the manager is bipolar today, approved in the morning and changed his mind in the afternoon,” she experiences something beyond discomfort: the acute perception that her real condition has been turned into a caricature describing banal temperamental instability.
For those who actually live with these conditions, the environment ceases to be safe the moment they perceive that their reality has been transformed into a rhetorical resource to describe others’ temporary discomfort. The implicit message is devastating: your existence is only tolerable when it is not literal. When it actually manifests, it becomes a problem, a limitation, something requiring “special accommodations” — never a legitimate dimension of human diversity that should naturally be contemplated in the design of organizational systems.
The same occurs with seemingly harmless expressions that populate corporate conversations: “you got autistic about those details,” “no need to be OCD about the formatting,” “this meeting is so ADHD, no one can focus.” Each of these phrases carries the message that neurodivergences are defects, exaggerations, problems — not legitimate ways of experiencing and processing the world.
Carlos, a designer diagnosed with level 1 autism, excels at perceiving visual patterns and inconsistencies others miss — a skill that has already saved projects from costly errors. When he hears “don’t get autistic about this” as synonymous with “don’t be overly detail-oriented,” he understands that his specific form of information processing is seen as a pathology to be avoided, not as cognitive diversity that adds value. The company benefits from his neurodivergence in practice while ridiculing it in everyday language.
Why Is Simplicity So Threatening?
This perception leads us to a fundamental question: why do so many organizations resist communicational simplicity? Why is clarity so often confused with superficiality, and unnecessary complexity interpreted as intellectual sophistication?
The answer reveals disturbing power dynamics. Hermetic language functions as a distinction device. It separates those who master the codes from those who must decipher them. It establishes subtle hierarchies between initiates and profanes. It serves as a marker of belonging to certain circles. Above all, it masks the absence of substance: it is far easier to appear profound by being obscure than to be clear while having something genuinely relevant to say.
Simplifying communication without impoverishing content paradoxically requires far greater mastery than producing convoluted texts and labyrinthine syntactic structures. Clarity demands rigor. Conceptual precision. The ability to distill essences without losing complexity. It is infinitely more difficult — and therefore far more revealing — than producing corporate documents that function as camouflaged rituals of exclusion under professional formality.
When an executive presentation uses twenty slides filled with overlapping charts, dense tables, and size-eight font text to convey three main insights, it is not demonstrating analytical depth. It is demonstrating an inability to synthesize — or worse, using visual complexity as a smoke screen to hide conceptual fragility. Audiences are bombarded with information in the hope that quantity compensates for lack of strategic clarity.
The phenomenon repeats in organizational policies written in incomprehensible corporate legalese, in processes described through flowcharts requiring a master’s degree to decipher, in codes of conduct that no one reads because they are intentionally built not to be read — only to legally protect the organization should someone claim “I didn’t know the rules.”
The Illusion of Neutrality: When the Standard Reveals Its Choices
But there is still the exclusion that disguises itself as technical neutrality. The recurrent use of generic masculines, career progressions structured for uninterrupted linear trajectories, benefits designed for specific family configurations, are frequently defended as “tradition of the language,” “administrative standard,” or “historically established model” — as if they were neutral territories, free of perspective.
There is no neutrality in language or systems. Every communicational and procedural choice favors certain modes of existence while invisibilizing others. When an organization systematically opts for generic masculines in communications, for examples presupposing uninterrupted professional trajectories, for institutional images reproducing homogeneous representations of leadership, it is not being neutral. It is actively choosing who will be at the center of the institutional narrative and who will need to perform constant cognitive translation and adaptation work.
Júlia experiences this viscerally. The only woman in technical leadership in her area, she has lost count of how many times she has read announcements about “managers and their teams,” “the leader and his decisions,” “the professional who wants to grow.” Technically, she knows she is included in those generic masculines. Symbolically, every time she reads those constructions, she must mentally insert herself into a linguistic category that does not spontaneously recognize her. It is additional cognitive work. It is a constant reminder that the presupposed standard does not contemplate her existence as a natural starting point.
The same happens with performance evaluation systems that penalize experience gaps without questioning their origins, that value “total availability” without recognizing that this presupposes specific domestic support structures, that celebrate “assertive leadership” using behavioral parameters that penalize women when they adopt the same behaviors celebrated in men.
When revealed neutrality is actually the universalization of a particular experience treated as standard, exclusion operates with maximum efficiency precisely because it refuses to recognize itself as exclusion.
Communication as Practice, Not as Manual
When we advocate for truly inclusive communication, we are not proposing vocabulary censorship or linguistic policing. It is not about replacing lists of forbidden words with permitted ones, nor following manuals that prescribe correct formulas. It is about something infinitely more demanding: developing awareness of how each communicational choice distributes possibilities of belonging. How it facilitates or obstructs access. How it recognizes or invisibilizes diversities of cognitive processing, existential trajectories, identitarian configurations.
It is understanding that an apparently neutral email can carry exclusionary assumptions. That a standard form can function as a barrier for existences not contemplated in its design. That everyday jokes about mental health can make environments hostile for those who live them literally. That gratuitous complexity does not demonstrate intellectual depth — only ignorance of one’s diverse audience.
Practicing this communicational awareness resembles, in fact, a continuous discipline. There is no arrival point, no final certification, no state of achieved perfection. There is process. Sustained attention. Availability to revise automatisms. Courage to challenge traditions that reveal themselves exclusionary when subjected to questioning. Flexibility to adjust structures that seemed natural but were merely naturalized by uncritical repetition.
And perhaps the most revealing question an organization can ask itself is not “is our communication correct?” but rather: “what world does our communication build? Which existences does it legitimate as central and which does it relegate to the margins? Who needs to make disproportionate effort to access what should be a basic right of belonging?”
Because communication is not merely an instrument of transmission. It is the materialization of values. Concrete expression of how the organization conceives humanity, diversity, dignity.
A company may have impeccable diversity and inclusion policies in institutional documents. But if its everyday communication presupposes a single addressee, if its systems silently exclude diversities of processing and existence, if its language perpetuates invisibilities — then the real culture of that organization is not in the declared values. It is inscribed in the communicational structures that determine, day by day, who is seen, who is heard, who is considered.
The most efficient exclusion is not the one that prohibits entry. It is the one that allows physical presence while making psychological belonging structurally inaccessible. And frequently, this exclusion operates through communicational choices that were never thought of as choices — merely reproduced as “the way we’ve always done things.”
Disautomatize these reproductions. Submit to critical reflection what seemed natural. Recognize that neutrality is always illusory and that all language positions people in hierarchies of relevance. Assume responsibility for the communicational architectures we build, aware that they do not merely transmit information — they distribute dignity, possibilities of belonging, the right to exist without constantly needing to translate oneself.
There is no ready formula for this transformation. There is only the commitment to practice it continuously, perceiving that every word, every structure, every undeclared assumption carries potential to include or exclude, to recognize or invisibilize, to dignify or diminish. And that, in the end, organizations truly committed to diversity are not those that talk about it in institutional materials. They are those whose everyday communication materializes it in every message sent, every form designed, every linguistic choice that affirms: here, your specific existence was considered. You do not need to translate yourself to fit. You already belong.
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