With growing economic, political, and policy uncertainty, global competition, cyber insecurity, global warming, and pandemic fears, coupled with stock market pressure and customers who expect near perfection, is it any wonder that leaders and employees are all stressed to the max? Organizations are as lean as can be and struggling to hire. Improvement efforts such as lean manufacturing, supply chain management, new technology, and SMART goals with an emphasis on accountability have reached the point of diminishing returns. What’s next? How can we do more with less? The answer is…

…greater clarity.

Leaders are desperate for the next generation of new thinking that will help them improve workplace performance – profitability and productivity- and workforce commitment and effectiveness. My new book, The Power of Clarity: Unleash the True Potential of Workplace Productivity, Confidence, and Empowerment, provides that new thinking. It’s the answer needed now.

Hidden in plain sight

Hidden in plain sight right in the middle of your organization is a huge opportunity. The land of disclarity. The part of the organization that isn’t guided by well-defined processes with clear objectives. The part that spends its time sitting in meetings, writing email, struggling with decisions, reporting and reviewing, seeking approvals or consensus, and managing personnel problems and conflicts. A Fortune 30 client study and my own surveys have determined that up to 80% of employee time is lost to these unproductive activities and general confusion. You cannot bill your customers for any of these activities! And yet, management tolerates this waste as if it is unavoidable. While we would never tolerate less than 99.9% production uptime, we are somehow content with 20% cognitive uptime.

Ask any employee how many hours a day they are able to be ultra productive and cruise with confidence to the completion of task after task. Ask them how often their work is sabotaged by these delays, distractions, too many priorities, shifting priorities, and other obstacles. Two hours a day of cruising with confidence would be a fabulous day for most of them! This is the problem no one is seeing or talking about. This is the waste accepted as business-as-usual.

We don’t see this problem because we are clarity blind. We can’t see that a lack of clarity is the root cause behind everything from poor productivity to personal conflict. We don’t realize that we can’t cruise with confidence if we don’t know exactly what we are trying to accomplish, how, and with whom. We don’t recognize that a lack of specificity, focus, and clearly-defined process is eroding progress every step of the way.

If you can’t see it and don’t know how to talk about it …

Since we can’t see the lack of clarity and don’t even have a vocabulary to talk about it, we have no hope of eliminating it. To give you an example of the latter, we always talk as if things might be ‘just a little unclear.’ The addition of my term, disclarity, meaning a total lack of clarity, gives us a full spectrum of possibilities, and opens the door to realizing that quite often we are far closer to the disclarity end of the spectrum than the uncommon clarity end.

If your organization is of any size at all, all your knowledge workers, managers, and executives operate in what I call the cognitive zone, which is currently the land of disclarity. This is where employees spend their days trying to move cognitive objects without the advantages of physical processes that move physical objects – advantages such as clear objectives, well-defined processes, shared vocabulary, mapping techniques, few priorities, and visible evidence of tangible progress. This is the land of ambiguity, kitchen sink conversations, ad hoc processes, and disjointed interaction. And this is your organization’s single greatest opportunity to improve profitability and productivity while also improving individual and organizational confidence and truly empowering employees by maximizing their ability to contribute their very best to the success of the organization.

In The Power of Clarity, I explain what the cognitive zone is, where it is, why it exists, and why it is filled with disclarity. I then set you on the path to transforming the cognitive zone with the power of clarity.

The Power of Clarity is a game-changer

This book will open your eyes and change the way you think and interact with others. Harness the power of clarity and you and your employees will become more effective, more productive, more profitable, and happier! This is the book that leaders and employees in every organization, for-profit and non-profit, need right now. Clarity is the new performance frontier.

P.S. Do you think I am exaggerating about the importance of greater clarity? Read Leaders Can’t Afford To Be Clarity Blind – Though Most Are. Or try 10 Signs You Aren’t As Clear As You Think You Are.

This article first appeared on Forbes, July 20th, 2021