What's the Thing?

You hear it in meetings all the time.

“We’re focusing on alignment.”

“We need to drive engagement.”

“This is about embedding a strategic shift.”

Everyone nods. It all sounds entirely reasonable and super professional. Sophisticated and grown up.

But if you stop and ask yourself, ‘what does that actually mean?’, it’s often surprisingly hard to answer. It’s not because the thinking is poor; it’s because the Thing hasn’t been fully named.

When leaders have been living inside a piece of work for months, the meaning feels obvious.

Of course it’s about alignment.Of course engagement matters.Of course this is a strategic shift.

Of course!

But that clarity is internal. It isn’t always articulated collectively or individually. It’s more of a feeling than an explanation. So what gets communicated is the shape of the idea, rather than the substance of it. And that’s where things start to wobble.

I remember a piece of work where the message was that the company needed to become more customer-centric. Again, completely reasonable. Very hard to argue with. But when you sat with different teams and asked what that actually meant, their answers were all over the place.

For one group, it meant improving response times. For another, it meant redesigning processes. For a third team, it meant being ‘nicer’ in interactions with customers (which made me wonder how they were currently talking to their customers!).

All of these interpretations were valid and well-intentioned. But none of them was the Thing, because the Thing hadn’t been clearly defined. What did “customer-centric” actually require people to do differently? What would stop? What would start? What would matter more than before?

Until the Thing was clear, people did what people always do. They acted on their own interpretation and the organisation moved, just not in the same direction. 

The Thing turned out to be: we are going to prioritise resolving customer issues first time, even if it takes longer in the moment.

So group one was partially correct about improving response times, but not the bit about taking longer to resolve issues first time. They prioritised responding quickly and parking the issue, which was pretty much the opposite of what was wanted. The other two groups were way off beam. 

Trouble is, people can’t act on ‘alignment’. They can’t do anything differently on Monday morning because of ‘engagement’. And ‘strategic shift’ could mean ten different things to ten different people.

So people interpret. They fill in the gaps, and they carry on as best they can.

From the outside, it looks like resistance, or lack of buy-in, or poor execution. But often, it’s none of those things; it’s simply that the Thing was never made clear.

The Thing is the part you can point to. It’s the moment where someone can say, “Ohhh, right. That’s what this is about. I totally get it!” It answers questions such as:

• What specifically is changing?

• Why does it matter?

• What do I need to do differently?

If your internal comms aren’t making those clear, the communication hasn’t landed, no matter how polished it sounds.

To be clear: this isn’t about stripping out professionalism or dumbing things down. Some ideas are complex, and some language does need to be sophisticated in order to be precise. But clarity and professionalism are not in competition. In fact, the more important the message, the more clearly it needs to be understood. 

A simple test is this: if you asked three different people what that message means for them, would you get roughly the same answer? Or would you get three completely different interpretations? If it’s the latter, the Thing probably isn’t clear yet.

Most communication problems don’t start with writing. They start with thinking that hasn’t quite been pinned down yet. The marvellous thing about clarifying the Thing is this: once it’s clear, the words tend to follow. And when people understand it, they can act on it. And that’s when communication starts to do its job.