One of the most frustrating things I hear from leaders is, “We had a great strategy, but just couldn’t execute it.” Clearly, if it was a great strategy, you would be able to execute it. If you couldn’t, you made bad assumptions about your capabilities, the competition, the marketplace, or something else.
This is related to an insight from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He argued that we cannot have a private language that exists only inside our own minds. Unless we can express an idea in a public context, it remains little more than a feeling that we have not yet defined.
That’s why a leader’s first responsibility is to communicate clearly. Every enterprise is an exercise in collective action, and success depends on others understanding where you want to take them. Here are three core principles that will help you communicate effectively and lead with clarity and strength.
1. Manage the cognitive budget
Born in the late 13th century, William of Ockham was a giant of his age. One of the intellectual lights of medieval times, he wrote commentaries on reason, logic, and political theory that are studied even today. His ideas about the separation of church and state were centuries ahead of their time and formed the basis for our own constitutional principle.
He’s best known for Ockham’s Razor, sometimes known as the “principle of parsimony.” Often, the principle is interpreted as “Keep It Simple, Stupid,” but that’s not quite right. A more accurate rendering is, “Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, if something doesn’t need to be there, it shouldn’t be. Everything you include should be intentional and serve a purpose.
A device I use for applying Ockham’s razor is to imagine my audience, whether that is a reader or a listener, as having an internal “cognitive budget” they are willing to devote to whatever I’m trying to tell them. Then I judge everything I include by the standard of, “Is this worth spending my budget on?”
Leaders, almost by definition, tend to be overachievers. We put in the work and want to show how thorough and thoughtful we’ve been, to let others into our thought process so that they understand not just the “what” but also the “why.” But in trying to be complete and comprehensive, we often overload messages with jargon, technical language, and philosophical detours that don’t need to be there. That’s how you lose an audience.
So be cautious and respectful with your audience’s attention. If you have any doubts whether it needs to be there, it probably doesn’t. Take it out and see if anything meaningful is lost. If not, keep it out and don’t look back.
2. Speak to shared values
Leaders want to be distinctive, so it’s not surprising that they strive to communicate in ways that set them apart and make them seem exciting. They position themselves as visionaries, disruptors, and innovators. Yet forging an identity that is separate and distinct from your audience can be off-putting and create distance.
Differentiating values are what make people passionate about an idea, but by definition they can seem strange, or even extreme, to others. That creates an inevitable backlash. It’s a simple truth that every revolution inspires a counterrevolution. To avoid that boomerang, you need to identify shared values that can bring people in without turning others off.
For example, leaders trying to promote Agile software development methods often tout the Agile Manifesto and are surprised to find that they don’t get much traction. Once considered state of the art, Agile is now losing popularity and an analysis in Harvard Business Review explains why: Trumpeting the values that differentiate Agile’s approach undermines the psychological safety needed to promote adoption at scale.
We call this the failure to survive victory, when initial progress gives way to backlash and regression. Inevitably, underlying the failure to survive victory is a failure to leverage shared values, usually in favor of differentiating values that allow people to assert their status and identity.
So a much better strategy is to focus on shared values, things everybody already believes in, such as better products, faster, and cheaper. If something is truly new, innovative, and different, people need it rooted in something familiar and mundane.
3. What type of conversation does your audience want to have?
Another key to effective communication is understanding the conversation your audience wants to have. In Supercommunicators, the bestselling author Charles Duhigg explains that conversations tend to center on one of three things: facts and analysis (“What’s this about?”), emotions (“How do we feel?”), or identity (“Who are we?”).
Duhigg explains the concept with a situation many will recognize. He would come home from work frustrated about something that had happened during the day. His wife would respond with practical advice and a fact-based analysis, which he found incredibly annoying. What he really needed was for her to understand his frustration, not practical advice.
We tend to approach important conversations by carefully preparing what we want to say. We rehearse our arguments, choose our words and think through every possible objection. Yet that often backfires because the conversation we plan for doesn’t align with the one our audience is ready to have and, inevitably, it falls on deaf ears.
So rather than preparing for one conversation, leaders need to prepare for three: one rational, one emotional, and one that affirms an identity. If your organization is going through an emotional situation, you need to speak to those emotions. A rational analysis won’t do. Similarly, if they are looking for a strategy, a “rally the troops” speech is unlikely to go over well.
You can’t force a conversation. You can only have the one your audience is ready to have. Meet people where they are first. Only then can you take them where you want them to go.
Letting the fly out of the bottle
Sometimes the hardest thing is merely to make yourself understood. Things that change the world, or even a small part of it, always arrive out of context for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet. That’s why great leaders need to be great communicators, because an idea that doesn’t gain traction is an idea that fails.
That’s easier said than done. As Fareed Zakaria has put it, “Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my ‘thoughts’ are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them.” Clearly, if he struggles, we all do.
The role of a leader has changed. It is no longer enough merely to plan and direct action. You need to inspire meaning and empower belief. That requires leaders to communicate clearly and powerfully by stripping away everything that doesn’t need to be there, speaking to shared values and meeting your audience where they already are.
As I wrote in Cascades, the key to transformational change is small groups, loosely connected but united by a shared purpose. The job of leaders today is to help those groups connect and forge a common purpose. Every transformational change begins when enough people start telling themselves the same story about the future.