Clarity isn’t certainty
We expect a lot from leaders - we expect them to know where the organisation is going, understand what is happening around them and make good decisions about what happens next.
Perhaps, more than anything, we expect them to have answers. That expectation might have made more sense when organisations operated in relatively predictable environments, but I’m increasingly unconvinced it works in the environments many leaders find themselves in today.
Markets change. Technology changes. Customers behave in unexpected ways. Competitors emerge from places we weren’t looking. AI is changing capabilities faster than most organisations can understand what to do with them.
And increasingly, decisions have to be made before all of the information is available.
The uncomfortable reality is that sometimes the leader doesn’t know either but… I don’t think that’s necessarily a failure of leadership. Pretending otherwise, however, just might be.
There is an important difference between certainty and clarity.
Certainty says:
“I know what is going to happen.”
Clarity says:
“We don’t know exactly what is going to happen, but we understand what we’re trying to achieve, what matters most and how we’re going to make decisions as we learn.”
Those are very different things. Perhaps one of the most important responsibilities of leadership in a complex organisation isn’t creating certainty at all.
It’s creating enough clarity for people to act without it.
When Clarity is Missing
The absence of clarity rarely announces itself as a leadership problem. Typically, it appears somewhere else in the organisation and gets given a different name.
Decisions take too long; people seem reluctant to take ownership and teams become frustrated with one another. Meetings multiply, priorities compete and relatively straightforward questions find their way increasingly high up the organisation before somebody feels able to answer them.
We might describe this as bureaucracy, poor accountability, resistance to change or perhaps even a problem with organisational culture.
Sometimes this is the case, but I wonder how often we’re looking at the symptoms rather than the cause.
If people don’t know what matters most, everything can become a priority. If they don’t understand where their authority begins and ends, escalation becomes the safest option.
If people don’t understand why a decision has been made, they may follow it while the circumstances remain exactly as expected, but struggle to adapt when circumstances change.
Perhaps most damagingly, people start learning that making a decision themselves carries more risk than asking somebody else to make it.
Over time, that behaviour can become self-reinforcing. Leaders become frustrated that people aren’t taking ownership, so they become more involved. As leaders become more involved, people become increasingly accustomed to looking upwards for answers.
Decisions move further away from the people closest to the problem and the organisation becomes slower, despite everybody apparently working harder to make it faster.
This can create an uncomfortable contradiction. An organisation can talk extensively about empowerment while simultaneously creating an environment in which people don’t feel particularly empowered at all.
Telling somebody they have ownership isn’t especially useful if they don’t know what they’re allowed to decide, which trade-offs they’re permitted to make or whether they’ll be supported when a reasonable decision turns out to be wrong.
The same problem appears during change. What looks like resistance isn’t always resistance to the change itself.
People may understand what they’re being asked to do without understanding why they’re being asked to do it, what problem it is supposed to solve or what should take priority when the new expectation conflicts with everything they were already doing.
In those circumstances, more communication doesn’t necessarily create more clarity. Organisations can communicate constantly and still leave people uncertain about what any of it means for the decisions they make tomorrow morning.
I think clarity has to mean more than communicating a strategy or explaining a decision. It has to give people enough context to interpret situations the leader couldn’t anticipate.
Otherwise, the organisation may appear aligned while everything is going according to plan, but the moment something unexpected happens, everybody looks upwards again.
In a complex organisation, something unexpected is always going to happen.
Clarity Without Control
The answer isn’t for leaders to become more involved. Doing so risks creating exactly the dependency we’re trying to avoid.
Creating clarity doesn’t mean telling people what to do in every situation. As a leader you still have to allow for autonomy of thought and responsibility – it should be a key part of the creative process. It’s often how better decisions emerge and ultimately leads to better results.
It simply means giving them enough context to work it out for themselves: what are we trying to achieve, what matters most, where does my authority begin and end, and what trade-offs am I allowed to make?
There will always be decisions that need escalating, but escalation should be a conscious choice rather than the default response to uncertainty.
If people understand the purpose, priorities and boundaries, decisions can stay closer to the people who understand the problem.
That also means accepting that people won’t always make the decision you would have made. Empowerment means very little if people are only empowered when they get it right.
Perhaps that’s the distinction between clarity and control:
Control tells people what to do.
Clarity gives them enough understanding to decide what to do.
Leaders don’t need to have all the answers. Their responsibility is to create the conditions in which other people can find them.
