TL;DR
Clarity isn’t about dumbing things down – it’s actually about discipline. Most leaders fail because they bury their point under layers of context, caveats, and complexity. The way to make your message as clear as possible is to get to the heart of the action and be clear about what’s next.
You’ve done the work. You’ve run the research, stress-tested the strategy, debated the options, and landed on a direction. Now it’s time to tell your team.
And then… you present 15 slides.
Here’s the hard truth: all that work you did to get to the decision doesn’t need to be in the room when you deliver it. It belongs in the appendix.
Real clarity – the kind that gets people aligned and moving — isn’t about saying more. It’s about saying less. Strategically, deliberately, and with discipline.
As the writer the 17th century French writer and mathematician Blaise Pascal (often misattributed to others) put it, “I’m sorry for the long letter. I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”
Getting to the core point is hard work. But it’s the work that matters most.
The Overexplaining Trap (And Why Smart People Fall Into It)
Overexplaining comes from good intentions that just went sideways. Leaders who overexplain are usually trying to be thorough, transparent, and credible. The problem is that more information doesn’t equal more clarity — it often works against it.
Three things drive us to overexplain, and all three are worth naming:
1. We equate complexity with credibility
If it sounds complicated, it must be really smart. If you need an engineering degree to understand it, it must be important. But here’s the flip side: the people who truly understand something can explain it simply. They can explain it to someone with zero background in the topic. True mastery shows up in simplicity, not jargon.
2. We’re protecting ourselves
A new strategy is a risk. So we hedge. We load up on caveats: “It depends on this,” “assuming that,” or “as long as X doesn’t happen.” The thinking is that if we cover every nuance, we can’t be wrong. But all those caveats actually dilute the importance of your message. Not everyone will absorb them — they’ll just walk away confused about what the actual direction is.
3. We think about what we need to know, not what they need to know
Not everybody in marketing needs to understand everything about engineering. Not everybody in engineering needs to know the full implications for customer service. Everyone needs to know where the company is going. That’s it. The team-specific details come later, filtered down through managers and supporting conversations.
The One-Slide Rule: A Real-World Lesson in Clarity
Recently, I was brought in to help a client prepare for an all-hands meeting. It was a big moment where they were communicating a meaningful shift in direction. When I saw the deck, it was 15 slides of market context, historical performance, future opportunities, and diagrams moving up and to the right. All of it was important, but none of it to the point.
I asked the leadership team one question: “What do you need people to do differently after this meeting?” The answer? Understand the direction.
You can’t get alignment from 15 slides. With 15 slides, you’re hoping. What you need is one slide with one message. So that’s what we worked toward — and it took hours.
Because that’s the real work of clarity: figuring out what doesn’t need to be there.
Everyone had a perspective on what mattered most. Engineering wanted their context in. HR wanted theirs. And all of those things are valid — but they don’t all belong on the main slide. They belong in the appendix, ready to be pulled up when the right question gets asked.
We eventually got it down to one sentence: we’re doing this, which means we’re stopping that and prioritizing this other thing. It’s clean, direct, and – most importantly – actionable.
When we asked the team after the meeting, “What did you hear?” almost everyone gave the same answer. That’s the point. When the message is clear, people carry it with them. When it’s buried in 15 slides, everyone walks away with a different version.
How to Actually Gain Clarity
Clarity doesn’t occur by accident. Great communication requires many disciplines. Here are three that make the biggest difference:
Lead with the decision, not the rationale
Don’t build it up as a magic trick with a big reveal at the end. Say it and say why. It is always better to say, “We are doing X. Here’s why” over “Here’s all the things that led us to the conclusion that we should do X.” Your audience doesn’t need to hear about your whole journey; they need to hear about where you’re going.
Use the ‘which means’ test
After every big statement, force yourself to finish this sentence: “We’re doing X, which means …”. If you can’t do it with a clear action or implication in a few words, stick with it! This is a brutal test and it is very useful. This is how you take a strategic direction and make it actionable. “We are in growth mode; that means hiring, changing price and entering new markets. That’s a message with grit, not fluff.
Cut until you feel uncomfortable
Here’s a gut check you should memorize: If you’re perfectly comfortable with the amount of detail on the slide, you probably haven’t cut enough.
Discomfort means you are in the right zone. Anything that’s cut off doesn’t disappear — it goes in the appendix. Appendices don’t say those stuff isn’t important. They say those things are there when you need them, but they’re not the big show
.
Clarity Is What Drives Action
When people don’t know everything, they don’t move forward. They fill in the blanks. And they don’t pack ’em with what you meant. They make their own versions of the message, hedge their bets, wait for the “real” announcement, and wonder when the other shoe is going to drop.
When things are clear people move, act and make progress because they can understand what the direction means for their role, their team, their priorities. They stop waiting and begin to act.
That’s the whole job of communication: to inspire action.
Not just to inform. If people leave a meeting with no clear takeaway, that meeting could have been an email. The goal isn’t to convey everything you know — it’s to give people what they need to do what comes next.
Clarity requires choosing. And choosing means leaving something out. That’s not dumbing things down. That’s making your message usable. And usable is what drives results.
So the next time someone on your team says “can we make this simpler?” — the answer is yes. Start there. Start simple. Build the nuance behind it, not in front of it.
Your team doesn’t need the whole story to start moving. They need the first sentence and when you give them that, everything else has somewhere to land.
Want to go deeper on clarity and communication? Listen to the Everything Speaks podcast with Lee Caraher.