Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal Post in two sentences:
Every important decision needs clarity, but clarity has a point of diminishing returns. The challenge isn’t reaching 100% certainty, but recognizing when you already have all the understanding you need to move.
Clarify before you amplify is my tag line, but it’s also the one sentence that guides everything as I live my mission – to illuminate understanding, enabling better decisions.
Personally, for a long time, I believed that if I could just gain a little more clarity, I’d make better decisions. If I could just have one more conversation, take a look at a specific framework, look at things from a different angle perhaps I could influence a much better outcome.
Except clarity became a comfortable place to live and only on occasion, I’d step out of that safe cocoon to venture into the world of amplification, only so much, and then I’d retreat again.
What I have come to realize is that clarification in my life and business had quietly transformed into hesitation.
I was no longer discovering anything new. I was simply revisiting what I already knew. Mainly as I got clearer I thought that certainty would arrive simultaneously…that I would know immediately that I was now super clear, and this was the moment to move. This was delusional.
What I now know for sure is this:
Good decisions rarely require perfect clarity. They require sufficient understanding combined with the willingness to accept uncertainty.
For me, that threshold is somewhere around 60 to 70 percent.
- Enough to understand the landscape.
- Enough to identify the major risks.
- Enough to know what I’m testing.
Notice I said testing – this is the way I am now practicing to look at anything I’m going to implement. IT IS A TEST.
The remaining clarity usually comes once I’ve made the decision, not before making it. Perhaps that’s another way to think about my tagline.
You need to clarify before you amplify just don’t confuse clarification with progress. Only after the decision is made do you begin to see what you couldn’t see while basking in clarity.
Strategic Reflection Prompt
If 70% clarity were enough, what decision would you make today?
About Giselle
Some of the most costly decisions begin with a wrong read of the situation.
I’m Giselle Hudson, The Pre-Fixer™. I am asked to intervene when something important needs to be better understood before a consequential decision is made.
As The Pre-Fixer™, I act as a strategic thinking partner, working with leaders to examine what they are seeing, separate what they know from what they may be assuming, consider what else might explain the situation, and surface what may not yet be visible.
I don’t fix; I pre-fix. My work happens before the solution is chosen, helping leaders build the understanding from which better decisions can be made.
Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, business and the patterns that shape organizations, following the questions and observations that help us understand situations more clearly before deciding how to respond.
What are you trying to make sense of right now?
