The cursor blinks. It’s the only thing moving with any real purpose. A tiny, rhythmic pulse of white on a field of gray, marking time while a human voice drones on about Q3 deliverables and leveraging synergies. There are 18 people on this call. I can see 8 of them in little boxes. The rest are black squares with names, digital tombstones in a meeting that died 48 minutes ago.

Someone asks a question. It’s a good one, a sharp one, the kind that could slice through the fog and get us somewhere. But it hangs in the air, unanswered, because the person who called the meeting is typing. You can hear the faint, frantic click-clack of their keyboard. They’re answering an email. Probably to someone else on this very call. We’ve optimized our entire world for speed, for efficiency, for data-driven precision. We have algorithms that can predict crop yields from space and manage global supply chains down to the screw. Yet we manage the most critical system of all-the transfer of intent and meaning between human beings-like a potluck dinner where everyone brought a different, unlabeled dish and we’re all expected to just figure it out.

Ambiguity is a tax on everything.

It taxes morale, draining energy as people struggle to interpret vague instructions. It taxes momentum, as projects stall waiting for a clarification that never comes. It taxes trust, as teams start to believe their leaders don’t have a clear vision. The total cost is staggering, easily amounting to a loss of

$8,788 per employee per year in wasted time and rework, a figure that feels both shocking and conservative.

I spent my weekend assembling a flat-pack wardrobe. The instructions were a series of pictograms that might as well have been ancient hieroglyphs. There were screws missing. Dowels that didn’t fit. I felt that familiar, hot-coiling frustration of being given a task without the necessary components for success. That’s what most corporate communication feels like. It’s a project plan with missing screws. A strategy document with instructions for a completely different piece of furniture.

Then you have someone like Cora L.-A. She’s a wind turbine technician. When Cora communicates with her team, there is no ambiguity. She doesn’t say, “Let’s touch base about the potential issue with the gearbox.” She says, “Pitch motor 2 on turbine 28 is reporting an overcurrent fault of 8 amps. I am executing checklist 7B. I need a voltage reading at junction box 38. Confirm.” Her world is binary. Clarity means safety. Vague language means a 3-ton blade assembly potentially sheers off and falls 238 feet to the ground. There are no synergies to leverage up there, only gravity. Her instructions are precise because the consequences of being misunderstood are immediate and spectacular. Why do we demand less precision when the consequences are just slow, creeping failures? A missed deadline, a budget overrun, a demoralized team-these are failures all the same, just without the dramatic crash.

It’s a strange paradox. We find this level of operational clarity in the most unexpected places, often far from the boardroom. You can find it in a professional kitchen, where “behind you!” is a non-negotiable ballet of safety and speed. You find it in the stickpit of an airliner. And you can find it in surprisingly meticulous hobbyist communities. People who dedicate themselves to a craft demand precision. You can perceive more operational clarity in a grower’s guide for cultivating specific strains of feminized cannabis seeds than you will ever find in a Fortune 500 company’s annual project charter. The instructions are direct, tested, and written for a single purpose: success. If a community built around a plant can achieve this, why do we tolerate a lower standard when billions of dollars are on the line?

This is the part where I have to contradict myself. I’ve spent the last several hundred words painting a picture of meetings and emails as the ninth circle of corporate hell. I stand by it. The default mode of communication is broken. And yet, I’m about to argue we need to communicate more.

Clarity is not a document. It is an outcome.

We need more conversations, but not the ones we’re having. The goal isn’t to reduce communication; it’s to increase the bandwidth of the communication we have. The goal is to eliminate ambiguity.

I once made a colossal error on a project, costing the company a sum I still feel a little sick about. It came down to a single word in an email: “review.” To me, it meant “give it a final look and approve.” To the engineer, it meant “give me your general feedback.” He gave feedback. I assumed approval. And an order for 2,888 custom components was placed with the wrong specifications. I blamed him. He blamed me. The truth is, the system was to blame. Our communication was an afterthought, a loose wrapper around the “real work.” We treated words as if they had a single, shared meaning, when they are, in fact, the most dangerous and unreliable tools we possess.

So, what if we treated communication like engineering?

Like a system to be designed, tested, and refined. Forget the sprawling, agenda-less “updates.” Instead, picture a communication protocol. Imagine a “Clarification Session.” It has one purpose: to destroy ambiguity.

The Clarification Session Protocol

Is it rigid? Yes. Is it overkill? For some things, absolutely. But for the critical arteries of a project, it’s a transfusion.

We love to talk about a culture of transparency, but transparency without clarity is just noise. It’s a firehose of information with no vessel to catch it. The real transformation doesn’t come from sharing more, it comes from clarifying what’s already been shared. The single most powerful thing a leader can do is not to have a grand vision, but to translate that vision into a set of instructions so clear that a team can execute without having to guess.