15 Potent Strategies for Fighting Confusion
Confusion is common; clarity rare.
Confusion rules until leaders courageously intervene.
Successful leaders always fight confusion and find clarity.
Secret weapon:
Clarity is leadership’s secret and most powerful weapon. Clarity allows followers to know where they’re going and how to get there. Without it everyone flounders.
Any fool can create complexity.
How to fight confusion and find clarity:
- Exclude things. Courageously rejecting options and alternatives allows clarity to emerge. Aha moments occur when clutter is swept away.
- Stop thinking. Recreation helps us stop thinking. Get lost in something else, play golf, run, read, cook …
- Give yourself advice. If you were advising someone else, what would you tell them?
- Skip a meal or two.
- Doodle.
- Journal.
- Sleep on it.
- Pray.
- Set a deadline.
- Discuss it with tough-minded people.
- Hire a coach. I call Bob Hancox. He presses me into clarity whether I like it or not. Thanks Bob.
- Take a small step. Move toward one of your options and see how it feels. Sometimes making a choice helps us know. Take small steps in private or with small groups. Frequently changing your mind in public is a leadership nightmare.
- Revisit values, mission, and vision.
- Ask, “What happens if we succeed?”
- Change locations. Go to a park. Coffee shops help me.
Bonus: Forget what others want. This may be the most useful and most difficult suggestion.
Finding clarity is eliminating options and
and aligning with values.
Note:
Clarity precedes decision making. This post is not about decision making. I’m offering suggestions on finding enough clarity so you can make decisions.
More:
Yesterday’s post and lively discussion offers many more useful suggestions regarding clarity: The Single Greatest Gift Leaders Give.
Can you remember when a moment of clarity hit you? What was happening?
Good continuation from yesterday. Now you complete the journey started with steps to become clear. This is useful stuff. Thanks!
When I am stuck, and that happens a lot my solution for clarity is to run an experiment.
On a small scale, I run through my brainstorms and then see the results.
I also ask others for guidance. Completely different people, not related to my line of work. People like school friends, parents, my girl friend.
I like that you mention clarity before decision making, that is really important. Too often I see big bang moves. Don’t know where we will go but lets try move anyways. Any action is only better than inaction when there has been a previous experiment on it.
That’s my key.
Dear Dan,
I really appreciate suggestions number 9, 10 and 13. We need to set deadlines. I believe in making tough deadlines which is possible to achieve but difficult. Deadlines with easy schedule is more likely to fail. When you set tough deadlines ,even if you do not meet it fully, you are likely to hit the bull’s eye. You should also discuss with tough minded people, They have more clarity about decisions. so, discussing tough mined people clarifies things better. The important things is to revisit values, missions and objectives. This provide clarity. I also believe that we also need to challenge and questions belief held by individuals. Many times we just follow belief, because it is created by someone and people follow it. It becomes just blind trend to follow rather than to question its relevance and authenticity.
I can recall a moment when clarity hit me was my own perception. I used to overvalue my potential but when I questioned my perception and opened up for learning, it actually enhanced my confidence many times. My belief is that we need to change, rethink and questions customs, beliefs and norms from time to time to check its consequences.
A visual, gut-level version of #13 — go walk through the world of the people affected. If you need clarity about something that will affect the plant, spend some time with employees there. If you’re confused about something related to your non-profit’s mission, go spend some time with the folks you serve. Sometimes reminding yourself of the impacts on people helps clarify.
I’d also like to add emphasis to the point, Simplify. If you can, scrape off all the barnacles that tend to encrust things at the leadership level and try to look at the core issue in as simple terms as possible. Too many moving parts is always confusing.
Great pair of posts, Dan.
For me clarity often hits when I am explaining the issues to someone not involved. I will explain the issue to this other person in terms that they can relate to instead of the terms I have been using to think about the issues. This new perspective will often give me the clarity I am seeking.
Sometimes I can achieve the same thing by just listening. Bringing up the issue with younger members of the team and finding out their thoughts. These are people who share the vision for the organization but often their point of view is less complex than my own. This allows me to bring into sharper focus how this issue relates to our mission and allows me to eliminate my own bias.
You’re exactly right. That’s why talking things through with my wife is usually helpful.
Good morning Dan. Great follow up post to yesterday’s lively discussion. My AHA moment occurred a while back when I realized I was talking too much, interrupting others way too much, not listening and certainly not communicating and connecting. I now am the silent listener, observer, nodding, and thoughtful team member. I spend more time answering questions then dictating commands or offering unsolicited advice. When I do speak I try real hard to use open ended questions to provide the maximum freedom to speak and answer. As you can imagine this is a work in progress and I practice everyday. I can see success when the team takes ownership and with guidance unravels on their own, obstacles and confusion. Providing tools and resources engages the team members in ways that promote cohesion, clarity and execution.Confusion should always be addressed promptly. It impedes forward motion and creates fear. Courage to reach further is hampered and impossible when question marks, clutter, and “garbage” abound. As a leader be the vacuum the team can use to cleanse the project.
“be the vacuum” and empty frequently! It is so much harder to listen than expound, yet we learn so much more. It seems greater clarity comes with less noise.
As a coach, I’m fond of #11!
I’m wondering about the relationship between clarity and paradox.
My brain loves the shades of gray, the entire spectrum between white/black, no/yes, right/wrong and so forth. Sometimes clarity, whether my own or someone else’s, feels like an imposed absolute. ‘By golly, I see it! It’s this!” And I immediately react/respond, “Yes! Except when it isn’t.”
My struggle is often to bring clarity to paradox and paradox to clarity so that I can say, without confusing people, “Sometimes this is true AND this other thing also is true AND there may be a third true thing hovering over there. Our task here is to hold all the parts in creative tension.”
This drives some of the other people in my life who tend to think in very clear-cut, almost polarized terms, absolutely crazy. They want one thing, one statement, one fact, one truth. While I don’t need to include ALL the others, I do think we run a great risk when we don’t allow for the creative power of the tension of paradox.
One of those moments of clarity hit me at 3 a.m., while percolating/perseverating/ruminating on patient care delivery issues. Spent the next 45 minutes typing up the thoughts/ideas/a-ha’s. Probably should have held off on hitting the ‘send’ button, but impulse control is poor at 4 a.m.
I liked your #14 and morphed it slightly…to ‘imagine what if’–doing something a brainstorm of the best of all worlds.
With clarity comes energy, just have to channel it well and that may be the harder task.
Can you remember when a moment of clarity hit you? What was happening?
I can remember lots of moments when I pushed clarity away due to discomfort. I am learning to listen to the innermost of voices. There’s a scene in the 1998 remake of Parent Trap where the twins are making life horrible for their father’s new fiancee because they want the father and their birth mother to reunite. The fiancee gets fed up and asks the “love of her life” – it has to be ME or THEM. What will it be? That dad says, from his heart, without batting an eyelash: THEM. T.H.E.M. THEM. We have to forego immediate pleasures sometimes to take the clear choice. It is worth it.
Straight to the point. I like that. I too strive for clarity. The world is comprised with of those who strive for confusion (even subconsciously) and those who strive for peace.
Great, informative article. Thank you.
gulfamx reblogged this on Sex & Health and commented: i agree with you
Taking time out to gain clarity and remove all of the other distractions is a must in today’s ‘information age’ of constant bombardment.
Deadlines can be an amazing clarifying mechanism…