9. Clarity is Hard
Information is often mistaken for clarity
Organisations produce enormous amounts of data: reports, dashboards, metrics, strategy papers, operational updates.
Yet clarity can be buried in competing signals, and difficult to see. Not absent, just difficult to recognise.
Information accumulating does not mean understanding increases.
The problem is not the quantity of information.
The problem is the absence of interpretation, the inability to discern what is critical. In Law, we would say that the material facts necessary to determine an outcome were either unknown or unclear.
The F1 Rosberg Story
I once saw this distinction illustrated in an unexpected place.
At the Formula 1 paddock during a practice session, Nico Rosberg had just returned to the garage after a run. An engineer handed him a tablet displaying telemetry from the lap — a screen filled with coloured graphs, performance traces, and performance metrics.
Rosberg, still sitting in the car, glanced at it and said over the radio:
“Guys, I told you before — you’ve got to make this easier to read.”
This was one of the best drivers in the world reviewing data from a car he had just driven at racing speed.
Even he did not want more information.
He wanted clarity.
Interpreting the Story
The “information vs clarity” distinction matters.
Organisations do not suffer from a lack of information. What is often lacking is the ability to interpret what matters within it.
Dashboards, board packs, and strategy papers often attempt to summarise complex realities. Presentations and meetings then try to unpack what’s “really going on”.
But summaries do not automatically produce understanding.
They often shift the burden of interpretation onto the audience.
The Regulatory Example
I had to secure a company’s ability to trade under new regulation by ensuring that the company met the requirements of five prudential regulators. This was due to the company’s strong relationships with related entities in the other four jurisdictions.
All our in-house resources were tied up with their own licensing and regulatory requests.
The safe and predictable options could have been to engage lawyers, actuaries, and supporting regulatory teams in five jurisdictions to file separate licence applications and set up parallel operating systems.
Or, as was the case, I could read the legislation, define one single application framework that would meet all the requirements, get the regulators to agree in principle to that framework which had never been set before, and then use that as the standard to pull all the Risk, Compliance, Finance, Actuarial, Capital, Legal, Sales, and Operations teams together to create a new way of working.
Interpreting this Story
The result was a single licensing process across five jurisdictions completed in a fraction of the time and cost of parallel applications. It also created an operating framework that became the standard the business ran on for years afterward.
Organisations have no shortage of information. But at decision points, clarity can remain elusive. Not because information is missing, but because interpretation requires experience, pattern recognition, and disciplined analysis.
The Story Beneath the Data
A lot of business buyers love to analyse what EBITDA looks like based on historical financial statements. This is necessary.
If a business shows a recent decline for both gross revenue and net revenue, they might conclude that it’s a failing business and move on.
If a second business shows gross revenue growth but flat net results until very recently, they might walk away from that one also as too volatile to be trusted.
But would it make a difference to you if:
for the first business, the owner had gone through a tragedy and had been more focussed on recovering personally? The machinery or the business had not changed and neither had the product profile or customer set. Just the heart of it all
for the second business, the owner had an epiphany after a weekend away with his family, completed some formal tech training and undertook a complete remodel of the operations? The customer set remained the same. The website looks a little different. But the changes under the hood have resulted in significantly reduced expenses with better YTD results YoY
Interpretation:
The “data” is never the whole story. The story underneath the data is where interpretation begins.
Why interpretation is difficult
Information can be generated automatically.
Interpretation is harder than producing information.
Interpretation requires judgment – including the ability to run multiple hypothetical pathways forward in your mind before the decision hardens.
It requires the ability to recognise patterns across different situations, to distinguish signal from noise, and to focus attention on what actually matters.
It requires distance from the system being observed.
It also requires discipline — the discipline to ignore signals that appear urgent but are not important.
Those abilities rarely appear quickly.
They are usually developed through experience, often by seeing how similar situations have unfolded before.
This is why organisations can accumulate enormous amounts of information and still struggle to reach clarity.
The process of producing information is loud and visible.
The meaning inside it is not.
The Core Idea
Clarity is not simply the presence of information.
It is the result of interpretation.
That interpretation requires the ability to recognise what matters and what does not — often within large volumes of competing signals.
The starting point may be visible.
The destination may be clear.
Interpreting the path between them requires judgment.
Closing
Clarity is rarely hidden.
But recognising it requires experience, pattern recognition, disciplined interpretation, and the ability to identify the right trade-offs.
The cost of misreading is rarely visible at the moment of the decision. It shows up later — in the options that are no longer available, the effort that couldn't be stopped, the direction that had already hardened before anyone named what was actually driving it.
Information can describe a situation.
Clarity reveals what matters.