Imperfect Clarity is Better Than Perfect Ambiguity

I was recently talking to a leader at one of my clients, which happens to be a company that is doubling in revenues every two years right now. They are doing a lot right. The product is excellent. They have established a unique position in their market; they know what their customers want and need; and they are delivering on it consistently. They also have a base of loyal employees. As a result, they are growing exponentially. This is the growth we work hard for as leaders.

At the same time, this pace of growth is challenging. What got you here becomes obsolete and must be adapted. The ability to figure out things along the way now leaves too much ambiguity and creates tension among the people doing the day to day work, who are simply looking for clarity in “what we focus on” and “how we do things.”

Even with all of the success, employees within the company had started to voice concerns that the leadership team was not aligned and that their trust in the leadership team was declining. There was frustration that there were too many “things on the plate” and that priorities were constantly changing throughout the year. These were the same people that had led the company to here, using the same approaches that had shown repeated success.

Sometimes when you are growing fast, you don’t have time to clarify everything perfectly. However, it’s critical that you always provide your people with enough clarity so that they know:

• where we are going,
• what’s most important,
• what’s the plan to get there, and
• how are we going to move together to make this happen.

In this instance, the leadership team clarified a one-page articulation of the company strategy, which made it simple to everyone what the core mission was, the values by which they were going to run the company, the core uniqueness that would never be sacrificed and the priorities for the next year. They re-clarified an annual planning process so that everyone knew how the company would choose priorities and determine focus moving forward. The leadership team also articulated a new set of working agreements on how the company would clarify roles and accountability for any action taken, how decisions would be made and who would make them, how meetings would be run to make them productive, and how communications would flow to keep everyone informed of what they need to know. Finally, the leadership team adopted a simple management rhythm in which they articulate 90-day priorities, assign accountability, manage them to completion and discuss and resolve issues weekly that come up along the way.

They did all of this within 90 days and retook control of their destiny as a leadership team and as a company. Credibility and trust in the leadership team immediately rebounded to be overwhelmingly positive.

Now, there was nothing in any of these actions that was perfect. They could have debated for 6 more months on every agreement, every process, and every word on the page. But they didn’t. They knew that 80-90% clarity was sufficient to move their teams in the right direction. And they trusted that they could figure out the rest along the way. I have found that it’s always more effective to start running once you have 80-90% clarity. In fact, you sometimes can’t fully see the final 10-20% of the picture until you start running.

The alternative is that you stay stuck or move too slow. You effectively choose perfect ambiguity over imperfect clarity.