Clarity in Leadership

Yesterday a colleague wrote to me after a meeting - “ ???????? ?????? ???????????????????? ?????????? ????????????, ????????. ?????? ???????????? ???? ?????????? ???? ???????? ?????????????? ???? ?????????????? ??????????.”

This is a common theme in my work. Often, I find myself in meetings with teams who have far more subject-matter expertise than I do but I'm told the value I provide is clarity. I'm often asked how I can quickly pinpoint the core issues and drive towards a decision on problems that required weeks for my teams to grasp fully.

Importance of Clarity

Most leadership lessons rarely touch upon the importance of clarity. But I’ve found clarity is essential as a leader to be able to

? Solve ambiguous or complex problems

? Navigate competing incentives in an organisation and chart a path forward when these incentives conflict.

? Make decisions with imperfect data and often under tight deadlines or stressful conditions.

? Communicate vision and decisions to those who may not have full context but who need to execute with absolute clarity

How to build Clarity

The question I often get is how do you develop this skill. Clarity isn’t developed overnight; it comes from years of problem-solving. The best way to build clarity is to put yourself in situations where you are exposed to lots and lots of hard problems. However, there are ways to accelerate this process.

Be insatiably curious: Always be curious about problems, even those outside your immediate role. For instance, while I don’t work directly with cryptocurrency, I am curious about what drives the growth(or not) of this area, why some products here succeed vs others don’t. Same for things like policy. I am curious about why governments enact new policies. For example, what's the rationale behind the CHIPS act, what are the problems this policy aims to solve, the stakeholders who care about that policy and what success means to them.

Abstract and Identify Flywheels: For any problem, focus on understanding the driving forces. When teams bring me problems, my first step is to map out the flywheel and separate relevant factors from irrelevant ones.

As you see lots of these problems, you start accumulating these flywheels - strategies, frameworks, abstractions, in your toolbox that you can deploy in the future.

A great analogy is how top chess players think. They don’t see each game as entirely new; they recognize familiar patterns, like openings and tactics. This pattern recognition helps them quickly decide on the best moves without analyzing every option from scratch.

Simplify: Reduce problems and solutions to their essence. If you had to do an elevator pitch or explain the issue to a 5-year-old, how would you do it ? Simplifying forces clarity.

Write: Writing is the one tactic that undeniably creates clarity. Writing forces you to exercise all the above - you have to understand the problem yourself to write about it. You have to make it logical enough for people to follow along, forcing you to identify the flywheel and you have to communicate it simply for others to comprehend. The more you write, the more you identify the logical connections/fallacies in your thinking and are able to force yourself to create clarity.

Hope the tactics above help you supercharge your thinking muscle. What are other tactics you use to create clarity for your teams ? Share them in the comments.