clarity: a license for good risk

Clarity is usually a gift from leaders because its absence is not a pleasant neutrality. It’s usually some kind of corrosive fiction.

If leaders aren’t telling their people what we (the collective) are doing, why, how it’s going, and what is praiseworthy in this moment, people will fill the negative space with their own stories of those things. Those stories are often crafted in good faith but they are just as often divergent in unhelpful ways. They are built from too few facts and facts that are clumsily prioritized. In a less noble arrangement, people turtle. They go into their shells and defend what they currently have instead of sticking their necks out to risk building something new and bigger together.

Clarity from a leader can be a very cheap license for people to see what is good for the whole as good for themselves and vice versa.

-Eric