Clarity is compelling. Speak plainly, document cleanly, and create experiences that are immediately understandable—for users and for your team. Communicating mindfully shows integrity, humility, and compassion.
I’ll keep this one short, in the spirit of the point I’m making.
I’ve sat in enough presentations to know what it looks like when someone is trying to elevate a concept higher than it needs to go. The Slack sidebars start: “what do you think they mean by this?” “do you know what we’re supposed to do next?” The room is nodding but behind the scenes, everyone’s confused. And in highly matrixed orgs or in low-trust environments where direct communication isn’t encouraged, weeks of misalignment follow from meetings where people dance around wondering what was meant by that passing sentence in the meeting instead of just asking.
There are so many points of failure here—delivering a poorly constructed message, not having clear follow-ups, and the audience not feeling empowered to seek clarity.
When we wrap ideas in unnecessary complexity, we don’t sound smarter. We create cognitive overhead that makes alignment harder, erodes trust, and puts distance between us and the people we need to bring along. The gap in understanding we create is completely artificial, and it’s avoidable.
Some of the most sophisticated thinkers I know are also the clearest communicators. They can take a genuinely complex concept and land it in a single sentence, or a well-chosen metaphor, or a three-slide deck that leaves no room for confusion. That’s not dumbing things down. That’s the presence of “craft” we hear so much about.
I believe in keeping documentation brief, concise, and accurate. I use storytelling to bridge comprehension gaps. I believe the most effective organizational design is the kind that gets out of its own way, because when people can actually align around something, everything moves faster and the work gets better.
Clarity is a skill. It’s also a form of respect for the people in the room. And if the instinct is to make something longer or more academic than it needs to be, that’s usually worth examining.