It's clear to you. That doesn't mean it's clear.

There’s a moment in most strategy processes that no one really notices. We've done all the brainstorming and workshopping and deciding. We're ready for the Big Reveal and the slide deck is ready to go. Then someone says (maybe with a sigh of relief):

'We just need to communicate this.'

And everyone nods, because at that point, it really feels like the hard work has been done. The direction is crystal clear. Now, all we need to do is communicate it so everyone else understands what we're doing. Then – oh, happy day! – we've finished! But often, that’s where the problem starts.

Because what looks like clarity at that moment isn’t actually clarity. It’s familiarity.

The people in the room have been living with the thinking for weeks, maybe months. We've debated it, shaped it, challenged it, heard it explained ten different ways. By the time it reaches 'we just need to communicate this', it feels obvious. Finished. Done. Tick.

But the people on the receiving end are encountering it for the very first time. There's no context, no backstory, no shared language. No memories of lightbulb moments. And instead of meeting them there, we start the communication at the end.

So what gets shared is something like:

➥ The conclusion, without the journey

➥ The decision, without the trade-offs

➥ The language leaders have become comfortable with, not the language others need

And when it doesn’t land, the reaction is predictable:

'We’ve already explained this.'

And we probably have – just not in a way that anyone who wasn't in the room could use.

This plays out at scale more often than we realise. Take the rebrand from Facebook to Meta. Inside the organisation, the thinking was clear. It had been worked through, debated, and aligned around a future direction. The shift made sense in the context of where the company believed it was going.

But outside that context, what landed was something else entirely. People didn’t see a strategic evolution. They saw a name change without a clear connection to their experience of the company. The explanation didn’t travel with the same clarity as the thinking behind it.

So people filled the gap with interpretation. Some assumed it was a distraction; others questioned the timing; lots of people just didn’t understand what had actually changed and weren't sure why they should care.

The confusion wasn't because the thinking wasn’t there, but because the communication started at the end of the story. Meta's leaders were super clear about the rebrand, but they assumed their collective clarity would travel intact from one context to another. Trouble is, it didn't.

Clarity isn’t just about what we say; it’s about where we start from. If communication begins after the thinking is finished, it will almost always feel incomplete to the people receiving it. Not because they’re resistant, and not because they’re slow on the uptake. It's because they’re being asked to join the thinking at the point we left it.

Most of the time, they can’t, so they fill in the gaps. They interpret, they simplify, and they translate it for themselves. And this is how one strategy turns into ten different versions of what it means.

I see the same pattern in organisations of all sizes. A leadership team aligns on a direction after months of discussion. A message is crafted carefully and shared.

And within days, different teams are explaining it in different ways.

It's not because anyone is trying to distort it, but because they’re reconstructing the thinking from fragments in a way that makes sense in their working context. Each version makes sense locally, but collectively, coherence is lost.

If we want something different to happen, the shift isn’t in the wording. It’s earlier than that; it’s recognising that communication doesn’t start when we write the message. It starts when our thinking is still forming, when we can still ask ourselves:

➥ What would this look like to someone seeing it for the first time?

➥ Where would they get lost?

➥ What would they assume if we didn’t say it?

Fundamentally, it's asking ourselves: What is the Thing that actually needs to change? Not the headline; not the ambition; not the language that sounded really cool in the room.

What's the real shift? What needs to stop? What needs to start? What needs to be different on Monday morning? Because without that, there’s nothing solid for clarity to travel through.

Once you reach the point where a strategy 'just needs communicating', you’re already working against the way clarity actually works. Clarity isn’t a finishing step; it’s something you build in at the start. Otherwise, you spend the rest of the process trying to recover it.