Clarity for lease. Imagine that! Sign the lease and suddenly:

• You have a new sense of strategic clarity. You know exactly what you are trying to accomplish. You have a vision that will clearly set you apart in the eyes of desirable markets.
• You know what kind of organization you have to become to deliver on that vision.
• You have a plan. It is ambitious, but also feasible and flexible. You are prepared because you know plans fail.
• Your employees understand what you want to achieve and why. Furthermore, they understand quite specifically how they will contribute to the organization’s success.

But that’s not all! That’s not even a fraction of the power of clarity! If you create a culture of clarity, you will achieve new levels of performance and profit.

• Productivity soars.
  • Meetings shrink by more than half.
  • Circular decisions stop circling.
  • Email no longer floods your inbox.
  • Guessing and second guessing are replaced with discernible progress.
  • Priorities occur in small enough quantities to be actual priorities.
  • Focus reigns and employees spend significantly more time ‘in the zone’ doing their best work.
• Performance takes off and confidence climbs.
  • Decisions are better and faster.
  • Delegation is much more effective and commonplace.
  • Employees at every level speak up readily, anticipate problems, and assume greater responsibility.
  • No one wastes time trying to achieve consensus. However, all-important commitment is achieved by involving the right people at the right time.
• Bureaucracy disappears.
  • That urge to control and watch people is a thing of the past.
  • Employees are truly empowered.
  • Accountability is a partnership, not a management power system.

If only it were so simple!

But it is not that hard either. Nonetheless, a culture of clarity requires mental shifts and new habits.

1. You must recognize the incredible lack of clarity permeating everything you do except, maybe, your value-delivery processes.
2. You must learn to speak the language of outcomes and avoid speaking in treadmill verbs that encourage endless talk instead of action.
3. You must extend your process improvement efforts beyond the processes that move physical objects and recognize the importance of processes that move cognitive objects. If you aren’t processing ideas, decisions, and plans with the same efficiency and clarity that you use to move products and deliver services, you are missing a ginormous opportunity!
4. The most common, building block processes for moving cognitive objects must be recognized, shared, understood, and executed using a shared vocabulary. Examples include:
   • SOARing through decisions
   • DRAWing plans
   • Using SPOT remover for problems
5. You must synchronize all that brain power you’ve hired so that people work together, not against each other. You need them to push, pull, lean in, and lean out in service to great decisions, not politics and personality issues.
6. You must learn how to truly empower people so they can contribute their best. You don’t want them wasting their time guessing how to play the game. Or chasing wild geese. Or worrying about office politics or career limiting mistakes.
7. You have to get away from the impulse to control people. You have to give up trying to create organizational clarity from the top. You need to teach people how to create clarity-on-the-fly so they can achieve profoundly productive clarity every moment of every day in situations that can not be predefined, predicted, or controlled by anyone other than those involved.

Organizations worldwide have increased productivity, reduced defects, and improved performance through lean thinking and quality initiatives. They have also learned to hire more effectively. What they haven’t learned is to create the level of clarity critical for high productivity and smart decisions. Clarity is the single greatest opportunity today for improving results. Unfortunately, it is not for lease.

Ann Latham is an expert on the transformative power of strategic clarity and author of The Clarity Papers. Download a free copy of The Clarity Quiz Collection from her website.

This article first appeared on Forbes, May 16th, 2018.