Excellent piece and the structural diagnosis resonated: vagueness is rational and changing how people feel won’t fix a system that rewards imprecision.
That framing alone is sharper than most writing on this topic.
The thing I’d add is that specificity also forces the upstream work that most leaders avoid.
You cannot be specific about a target you haven’t actually committed to or precise about a priority you haven’t ranked.
Vague language is often the surface symptom of a deeper unwillingness to make the hard choices that specificity would expose, which means the corrective is demanding it earlier, at the moment the commitment is being formed rather than the moment it is being reported against.
Exactly right, and that point is one of many that we go deep on in the Operator Insight for subscribers, as well as numerous intervention steps and diagnostic tools.
Excellent piece and the structural diagnosis resonated: vagueness is rational and changing how people feel won’t fix a system that rewards imprecision.
That framing alone is sharper than most writing on this topic.
The thing I’d add is that specificity also forces the upstream work that most leaders avoid.
You cannot be specific about a target you haven’t actually committed to or precise about a priority you haven’t ranked.
Vague language is often the surface symptom of a deeper unwillingness to make the hard choices that specificity would expose, which means the corrective is demanding it earlier, at the moment the commitment is being formed rather than the moment it is being reported against.
Exactly right, and that point is one of many that we go deep on in the Operator Insight for subscribers, as well as numerous intervention steps and diagnostic tools.