The Clarity Gap

One of the patterns I've noticed across organisations of very different sizes and sectors is this: when people aren't completely clear on what's expected of them, they rarely stop.

They do more.

Meetings multiply. Emails threats get longer. Progress updates become more frequent. A report is revised before anyone has asked for revisions. A presentation grows from ten slides to twenty. Someone stays online a little longer, just in case.

From the outside, it looks like a highly engaged team.

From the inside, it often feels like everyone is working hard without quite knowing whether they're working on the right thing.

A project begins with a broad brief.

Everyone leaves the meeting believing they understand what needs to happen. Nobody asks too many questions. After all, nobody wants to be the person who "doesn't get it."

So the work begins.

Without a shared definition of what success looks like, the work starts to expand.

A report that needed three pages becomes seven.

A presentation designed to inform slowly turns into one that defends every recommendation.

An email is drafted. Then reviewed. Then rewritten. A second person is copied in—not because their input is needed, but because it feels safer if someone else has visibility too.

Eventually, a decision needs to be made.

It gets escalated.

A partial answer comes back.

Different people interpret it in different ways, and everyone carries on.

The effort is genuine.

The busyness is real.

But underneath it all sits a question that was never answered:

What does good actually look like here?

Imagine a cross-functional project inside a growing organisation.

The people involved are experienced.

They're committed.

Everyone agrees the project matters.

But the objective has never been clearly defined.

Priorities shift depending on who's in the room.

Success means slightly different things to different stakeholders.

One person responds by producing more. More detail. More documentation. More communication.

Another spends longer researching, reluctant to commit to a direction that might later prove wrong.

A third makes a decision and moves ahead, only to discover weeks later that someone else had been working towards a completely different outcome.

None of these people are underperforming.

They're doing their best to navigate uncertainty.

The problem isn't capability.

It's clarity.

Instead of investing their attention in the work itself, they're investing it in figuring out how to do the work.

When the project eventually slows down, the conversation often turns to communication, collaboration or accountability.

Far less often do we ask a simpler question:

Did we give people enough clarity to do good work in the first place?

Ambiguity is expensive.

Not because it creates dramatic failures.

Because it quietly creates unnecessary work.

Hours spent second-guessing.

Work that gets redone because people were solving different problems.

Meetings to realign what could have been clarified at the beginning.

One of the patterns I see repeatedly is that people don't respond to unclear expectations by doing less.

They respond by doing more.

More checking.

More documenting.

More explaining.

More activity.

Not because they're inefficient.

Because activity feels safer than making the wrong assumption.

As organisations grow, this becomes more costly.

The informal clarity that existed when everyone sat together and conversations happened naturally becomes harder to maintain. Teams become larger. Projects become more interdependent. Decisions involve more people.

Without intentional clarity, people begin creating their own.

The result is rarely alignment.

It's motion.

Think about the last project that took longer than expected.

How much of that time was spent doing the work?

And how much was spent trying to work out what the work actually was?

When I work with organisations, I rarely find teams that aren't working hard.

What I find are teams working incredibly hard without always having enough clarity.

They're not avoiding the work.

They're trying to work out what the work is.