Dr. Desheila Rumph

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Desheila Rumph

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Series: Clarity Before Change

One of the quickest ways to assess organizational clarity is simple. Ask several people the same question and listen to how many different answers you get.

What are we trying to accomplish? What are our priorities? What does success look like? What are we expected to do differently? How will we know whether it is working?

If those answers vary widely across an organization, the issue is bigger than communication. It is a clarity problem.

I have walked into environments where there was no shortage of effort. There were plans, initiatives, professional learning, meetings, consultants, goals, and people genuinely trying to improve outcomes.

But when I began listening to the people doing the work, something became apparent. Different people were carrying different understandings of what mattered most.

Ask about the goal, and you might hear different numbers. Ask about the priority, and you might hear different initiatives. Ask what teachers were expected to implement, and the answer could depend on who had most recently provided support. Ask how progress would be measured, and the answer might change again.

No single person created the confusion. In many cases, everyone was doing exactly what they believed they were supposed to do.

That was the problem. The organization had information, activity, and effort. It had not yet developed enough collective clarity to turn all of that effort into aligned action.

Beneath the surface

When I see this pattern, I do not immediately conclude that people are resistant, ineffective, or unwilling to do the work. I start looking at the system.

Conditions like this tend to travel together. Watch for:

  • multiple priorities competing for attention;
  • different interpretations of the goal;
  • inconsistent language across teams or departments;
  • unclear roles or responsibilities;
  • conflicting messages from different levels of leadership;
  • communication that happens once but is never revisited;
  • meetings that share information without producing clear actions;
  • initiatives operating independently rather than toward a common outcome; and
  • Monitoring processes that track activity without checking whether implementation is aligned.

These conditions can make capable people look inconsistent. They can also lead leaders to believe they have a performance problem when they may first have a clarity problem.

Leadership insight

Communication is not the same as clarity.

An email communicates. A presentation communicates. A meeting communicates. A memo communicates. But the fact that something was communicated does not mean people developed the same understanding from it.

Collective clarity becomes visible when people across the system can independently articulate a common understanding of the work. They know where they are going, why it matters, what matters most right now, what their role is, what they are expected to do, and how they will know if it is working.

That is different from simply receiving information. That is when communication begins to produce alignment.

Visual / framework

The Collective Clarity Framework

Questions I would ask

  • Can people across different roles independently articulate the same primary goal?
  • Is there a common language for the work?
  • Could people explain why the priority matters, rather than just naming it?
  • Do individuals understand their responsibilities and how their work contributes to the larger outcome?
  • Are expectations recognizable across teams, departments, classrooms, or settings?
  • Can people distinguish what is essential from what is supplemental?
  • Is important communication accessible after the original conversation, meeting, or email?
  • Do meetings result in documented decisions, responsibilities, timelines, and follow-up?
  • When implementation begins to drift, is there a process for identifying and correcting the misunderstanding?
  • Can the people closest to implementation explain what success is supposed to look like?

That last question matters most to me. I do not want to assess clarity only by asking the person who developed the plan. I want to know what happened to the message as it traveled through the organization.

The sequence loops back to Vision & Outcome through a cycle of clarifying, adjusting, and reinforcing.

Clarity is not something leaders establish once at the beginning of the year and assume will remain intact. People change. Conditions change. New initiatives appear. Priorities compete. What seemed clear during planning may become far less clear once people begin doing the work. Leaders have to monitor clarity itself.

Where do you Stand?

Click of the link below to view the clarity rubric.

Clarity Starts Here!

Implications for leaders

Make the destination unmistakable. People should understand the outcome the organization is working toward and why it matters.

Reduce competing messages. Not everything can be the priority at the same time. New initiatives should align with the broader direction rather than become another disconnected demand.

Create language people can share. Common language makes complex work easier to communicate, monitor, coach, and improve.

Make communication retrievable. Important information needs to live beyond the moment it was communicated. People need ways to revisit expectations, decisions, resources, and next steps.

Monitor understanding, not just compliance. Before assuming someone failed to implement an expectation, determine whether the expectation was understood in the first place.

Listen at the end of the system. One of the strongest tests of organizational clarity is what the people responsible for implementation actually understand.

A simple clarity check

Ask five people in different roles this question:

What are the three most important things we are trying to accomplish right now?

Do not correct them. Do not explain what you meant. Do not tell them the answer. Just listen and compare what you heard.

Then ask a second question:

What are you expected to do that contributes to those priorities?

And a third:

How will you know whether what you are doing is working?

The alignment, or misalignment, in those answers tells you a great deal about how well the organization’s message has traveled from intention to implementation.

Closing thought

Organizations can have talented people, committed leaders, strong programs, extensive resources, and a tremendous amount of activity, and still struggle to improve.

Sometimes the first thing they need is not another initiative. They need to get clear.

Clarity creates alignment. Alignment strengthens implementation. Implementation is where plans finally have an opportunity to become results.

So when everyone has a different answer, I do not immediately ask who is not doing what they are supposed to do. I ask what our system is communicating and whether we have created enough collective clarity for people to act on it.

That changes the conversation from blame to understanding, and from understanding to action.

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