THE LEAPLET

February 29 2024

clarity: subtext to text, even now and even over, license for risk

CLARITY: BRINGING SUBTEXT INTO TEXT

Leaders looking to deliver clarity can often do it to great effect in off-stage moments. Your all hands, your annual update, your keynote address - these are all good fora for clarity but they can’t meet the ongoing need your team has for it on their own.

I’ve found myself grateful over and over for leaders who do small scale clarity by bringing subtext into text. They name a weird vibe in a conversation and ask or suggest what might be done about it. They point out when traditional power dynamics would tilt in one direction but the current situation reverses that orientation. In ambiguous transitions, they assign ownership for making those transitions go really well. They say, “no one is using this process I put in place - let’s make it better or get rid of it or teach people how to use it better.” They acknowledge and legitimize negative or difficult feelings people may have about a thing they’ve chosen to do, without letting people off the hook. 

Read the rest here.

CLARITY: EVEN NOW AND EVEN OVER

When I zoom out and look at what is consistent across the best leaders I’ve worked for and with - they all pull this move. They deliver clarity, even and especially in the cases where it’s socially or emotionally risky to do so. Even and especially in the cases where, paradoxically, they’re clearly talking to you about the ambiguities.

Their clarity does work for their teams, even now and “even over.”

Some leaders deliver strategic clarity - this is our purpose! Yes, even now, in the face of these weird, bad, unexpected facts. Some deliver cultural clarity - this is how we show up for each other and those we serve! Yes, even now. Some deliver operational clarity - this is our process! Yes, even now.

In Holacracy, Brian Robertson offers a pithy mad lib to help you get that clarity in the face of ambiguity. He advises teams to get real about how little they can predict and to spend less time trying that. Instead, leaders of teams can say, “we deliver [desirable feature x], even over [desirable competing feature y].”

Read the rest here.

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.

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COMPELLING QUOTES

Physicist Carlo Rovelli on ephemerality:

Life is precious to us because it is ephemeral. In the world described by quantum mechanics there is no reality except in the relations between physical systems. It isn't things that enter into relations but, rather, relations that ground the notion of 'thing'.

Holacracy guy Brian Robertson on unpredictability:

When we attempt to predict the future in an unpredictable world, not only are we deluding ourselves, but worse we are actually inhibiting our ability to sense and respond to reality in the present moment.

Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer on healing action:

Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric