The Power of Clarity: A Leadership Imperative in IT and Beyond
In 2000, Patrick Lencioni’s best-selling book “The Four Obsessions of An Extraordinary Executive” was published. It remains one of my favourite books on leadership, and has shaped my own understanding of the problems that befall companies and organizations. The book is written as a “leadership fable” to present four principles:
- Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team.
- Create organizational Clarity.
- Over-communicate the identity and direction.
- Reinforce organizational Clarity through human systems.
Three out of four of these are explicitly about the importance of creating and maintaining Clarity on identity, values, objectives, roles, and responsibilities. The necessity of having Clarity (on the particular characteristics, strengths, and personalities of each member) is also emphasized as being crucial to having a cohesive team.
But the importance of continuously pursuing Clarity is not limited to the executive level. Nor is it something that should be done merely for the sake of improving productivity. Lack of Clarity is the root cause of all problems. The danger is particularly acute in today’s IT and telecom sector. With much of the world relying on an increasingly complex and interconnected IT landscape, lack of Clarity can have serious consequences.
Part 2 – The Dangers of a Lack of Clarity in IT
The 2024 CrowdStrike outage affected airlines, banks, businesses, and governments around the world, and has been named “the largest outage in the history of information technology”. CrowdStrike’s internal investigation points to a lack of sufficient testing and quality control causing a faulty update to be released. One can speculate as to why it was decided to do things that way, but the fact remains the same: a decision was made, based on false assumptions. But the fact that assumptions may be wrong isn’t the problem in itself.
We rely on information to make decisions. But information is always incomplete, and we fill in the blanks with assumptions. When we are explicit about our assumptions, and know they are assumptions (not knowledge), then we can manage the risks of our assumptions potentially being wrong. But when our assumptions are not explicitly known and understood, we leave things entirely to chance. And sooner or later, the die rolls against us. Hence, the purpose of seeking Clarity is to ensure assumptions are known and understood.
The pursuit of Clarity exposes vulnerabilities in our current state, and our way of doing things. Especially in organisations where critical reflection isn’t the norm, this can be uncomfortable. But make no mistake: known vulnerabilities can be remedied; unknown vulnerabilities will be exploited. This is why NIS2 and other cybersecurity regulations demand continuous commitment to Clarity, through risk detection, process analysis, and asset inventorisation.
Vulnerabilities aside, lack of Clarity leads to ambiguity and uncertainty that hamstrings any organisation. It hampers effective collaboration, bottlenecks productivity, and causes anxiety, frustration, and burnout among people. Anyone with even modest experience will likely have experienced this sooner or later. Especially in larger organizations, things can seem remarkably opaque. Despite how evident the need for Clarity for effective action might seem, systemic confusion and uncertainty continues to plague businesses and organizations everywhere.
Part 3 – The Painful Truth
IT organisations often delay initiatives and minimize investments aimed at enhancing Clarity, such as process management, risk management, enterprise architecture, and asset management, until a hard crisis or external authority forces things. There are three (related) reasons for this:
- Underestimating the risks of ambiguity: Decision-makers may underestimate the risks posed by a lack of Clarity. Paradoxically, this often results from a lack of awareness on potential threats. But cognitive bias also plays a significant role. Managers may come to overly rely on past successes, or assume that everyone shares their understanding of a situation. Such bias is further exacerbated if employees are discouraged from challenging management thinking.
- Seeing immediate costs rather than long-term benefits: IT leadership is under constant pressure to deliver immediate, tangible value to their business sponsors. These sponsors are commonly not interested in paying for IT-internal projects that don’t appear to directly benefit them. In such an environment, Clarity measures are only taken when forced by circumstances, and then only the bare minimum. At best, they only deal with symptoms. At worst, they only give the appearance that something has been done. This short-sighted approach might temporarily reassure, but in fact only weakens the organisation further. The root cause is not addressed, nothing is prevented from happening again, and no greater maturity has been inspired. Paradoxically, the reluctance of IT leadership to demand the resources needed for structural improvement signals to sponsors that IT isn’t worth such investment – and ultimately nothing but a cost.
(This situation is remarkably similar to the common challenge NGO’s face. They rely on donors to operate, but these donors insist their funding goes directly and fully towards the NGO’s cause. These donors don’t want to pay for the NGO’s overhead – despite this overhead being critical for the NGO’s operations. I will discuss solutions in a follow-up article.) - Pursuing (in)security through obscurity: And then, there is the most cynical reason of all. Quite simply, it is often considered advantageous to purposefully keep things opaque and confused. Security through obscurity is sensible when employed against competitors and potential hostile actors. But when decision-makers are not committed to the four principles outlined above, the resulting ambiguity and uncertainty quickly pivots the organisation from focusing on results to focusing on politics. The definition of competitors and potential hostile actors then expands to include colleagues and supposed partners. Worse, some expand it further to include even themselves – fearful of what Clarity might reveal. Across the organisation, Clarity initiatives are resisted for fear they will reveal vulnerabilities the enemy will exploit, undermining job security, changing roles and authority, or diminishing their status within the organisation. It may be understandable, but a resistance to what critical reflection reveals, in itself reveals insecurity.
Conclusion
The root cause of all problems is a lack of Clarity. The root cause of a lack of Clarity is a choice; the pursuit of Clarity is a choice. Not pursuing Clarity is also a choice. But while pursuing Clarity may reveal uncomfortable truths, not pursuing Clarity won’t make those truths disappear. It only leaves their revelation to chance and powers beyond your control, at the worst possible time.
The pursuit of Clarity is not about having all the answers. It’s about having awareness of the assumptions that are made, and how these impact your way-of-working and results. There are always limited to what can be known. But you need to know what you don’t know perhaps more than what you do know.
By embracing the pursuit of Clarity in all parts of their working, IT organisations can shift from reactive to proactive, prevent problems before they happen, and enhance their efficiency, resilience, and adaptability in an ever-evolving technology landscape.