Why does polysemy fail?

The most common reason polysemy fails: Assuming that because someone used your vocabulary, they share your meaning. This manifests as violent agreement — two people passionately agreeing with each other while holding incompatible interpretations. You will not catch this failure mode by listening more carefully. You catch it by asking 'What does that look like concretely?' and comparing the concrete descriptions.

The fix: Pick a word you use frequently in your work — 'quality,' 'done,' 'strategy,' 'alignment,' 'simple.' Ask three colleagues to define it in one sentence without discussing it first. Compare the definitions. The divergence will be larger than you expect. Write down the range you discover. You now have evidence that your most common words are less precise than you assumed.

The underlying principle is straightforward: Shared vocabulary does not guarantee shared meaning.