I found a great quote in The Overstory by Richard Powers:

“You can’t see what you don’t understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice.”

This is a really important observation that applies to many things. In the case of The Overstory, it applies to trees. We understand so little about trees, while at the same time our familiarity with them makes us blind to perfectly visible facts, lessons, and perspectives. We don’t realize how amazing trees are, how they communicate, and how important they are to us. And we don’t see how short-sighted, misguided, and self-destructive is our human-centric view of the world.

The same is true of clarity. We think we know what clarity is. We think it is good. But we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know how to assess levels of clarity, how to recognize the extent to which it is missing, or how to create greater clarity. At the same time, this inability to understand clarity affects everything we do. Our most familiar and frequent tasks—tasks such as decision making and problem solving—suffer from a lack of clarity. But we don’t see that. This inability is what I call clarity blindness.

Are you clarity blind? Want to know how you can tell? Find the answers in my recent post, Leaders Can’t Afford To Be Clarity Blind – Though Most Are.