How to create clarity
Actionable rules on how to create clarity out of the noise of unstructured information.
Turning chaos into clarity is a superpower.
We all tend toward complexity - oversharing details, diving deep into technicalities, and chasing absolute precision.
In trying to appear informed and dedicated, we sometimes bury what truly matters under a flood of unstructured data.
The only way through this fog is to create clarity. It isn’t easy.
It demands problem-solving and deliberate focus. As you ramp up experience, knowing where to look becomes more intuitive, though it never is simple.
Over the past decade, I’ve collected practical observations on how to refine this skill.
What follows is a distilled set of actionable rules - guidelines to help you cut through the noise and stay laser-focused.
Today’s article
A typical meeting. What can go wrong and how to avoid it by creating clarity.
My top five rules for creating clarity. Manage oscillation, levels of abstraction, align context, limit accuracy and fine tune verbosity.
🕵️♂️ Dissecting a typical meeting
4-6 people get together in a room to discuss an important topic.
Through a lot of back and forth as they swing from one idea to another.
Then one of the participants becomes emotionally affected by a specific trigger.
He starts off a long escapade on a very specific use case and goes deep into the weeds.
Other participants quickly lose focus as they lack context and perceive this use case as irrelevant for the topic of the discussion.
After a while a second participant picks on a trigger keyword and shares his personal opinion on it.
An hour passes by. The participants have barely scratched a surface on the topic and achieved no resolution.
What went wrong?
First. A clear goal wasn’t defined.
Second. There was no facilitator, who could have channeled the discussion into the direction of the topic.
Third. There was emotional oscillation from some of the key participants. We all prefer to talk about the topics that emotionally resonate with us rather than the ones being discussed (more on that below).
Fourth. Participants were jumping between different levels of abstraction and going too deep into the weeds.
This was multiplied by the amount of people in the meeting.
The more people in the meeting, the more complex it is to handle and less effective (unless, it’s an All Hands event).
✨ 5 key rules for clarity
1️⃣ Oscillation
Sustaining focus on a single topic for an extended period is mentally taxing.
One of the effective ways to avoid focus and save energy is oscillation.
We all are naturally driven towards the topics with the highest emotional resonance.
If there’s an angle or a use case in the topic that resonates with us the most - we gravitate towards it.
The problem is that these use cases may be only partially relevant or entirely irrelevant to the topic of discussion.
Effective way to mitigate this is to have written notes.
Writing the meeting notes down allows you to see when the shift from the topic has happened and gently nudge the audience and yourself back.
2️⃣ Levels of abstraction
We tend to bias toward the level of abstraction at which we are most proficient.
This natural tendency aligns with our roles and expertise but can sometimes lead to misalignment.
For instance, a software engineer is deeply familiar with technical details within a specific codebase.
An engineering manager, on the other hand, can zoom out to consider team dynamics and dependencies.