The quiet power of naming in organisations

In many organisations, some activities remain in the background.

They clearly exist.
People spend time on them — sometimes a lot of time — yet they still feel difficult to grasp.

They become “the thing we’re working on”, “the initiative”, or “that topic we’re trying to move forward”.

Most people roughly understand what it is about.
But rarely in exactly the same way.

Then, at some point, it gets a name.
Not an administrative label, but a real name people naturally start using.

And from there, something begins to shift.

What remains unnamed is difficult to share

In practice, what is not clearly named often struggles to exist collectively :

• The boundaries keep shifting.
• Expectations vary.
• So does engagement.

We often see this in cross-functional projects, but also in team rituals, informal dynamics, or emerging roles. As long as something has no name, there is no real shared anchor point.

This phenomenon is fairly well known in cognitive psychology: naming helps people categorise. It creates a kind of mental reference point that makes a situation easier to recognise and share.

Linguistics points to something similar. What is named becomes more visible in conversations and interactions.

Put simply, a name reduces the effort needed to understand and communicate something.

A name changes the dynamic

As soon as an activity has a clear and shared name, it becomes easier to sustain. The name starts circulating, comes back into conversations, and gives people something they can quickly refer to.

And quite often, engagement shifts as well. People are no longer contributing to just another task, but to something with a recognisable existence.

A few well-known examples illustrate how a name can become a collective reference point:

• Apollo gave the American space programme an almost mythological dimension
• Erasmus+, in Europe, moved far beyond its administrative framework and became an experience in its own right
• Rail 2000, in Switzerland, took a very different approach, built around simplicity and clarity

A quiet way to create structure

This principle does not only apply to large-scale projects.
We can also see it in much more everyday situations:

• A team ritual. In some organisations, formats such as the “coffee catch-up”, the “Monday team session” or the “extended leadership meeting” gradually become real collective reference points. The name helps stabilise the ritual and makes it easier for people to relate to it.
• An informal dynamic. At Google, the “20% time” rule gave concrete existence to something that could otherwise have remained vague: dedicating part of one’s working time to personal explorations connected to work.
• A type of situation. The expression “tunnel vision” helps describe those moments when a team becomes so focused on execution that it progressively loses sight of the broader context and the actual needs around it.

Of course, not everything deserves a name. And not everything needs a carefully crafted one either.

What matters is appropriation. If people never use the name naturally, it does not really serve a purpose. But when the wording feels right, something tends to stabilise.

In the end, naming is not about adding another layer. It is about making visible something that already existed, but only in a diffuse way.