Why Fog at the Top Is the Most Expensive Thing in Any Organization
There is a kind of fog that settles over the piney woods in the early hours, before the sun has done its work. If you have lived in this part of Texas for any length of time, you know it. It is thick enough to slow a truck to a crawl and soft enough that you forget, for a minute, that it is dangerous. The fog is not the problem. The problem is what you cannot see while the fog is there.
I have come to believe that most organizations are operating in exactly that kind of fog, and the people inside them have stopped noticing. They have adjusted. They drive slower, speak more carefully, double-check what used to be obvious. The fog becomes the weather, and the weather becomes normal, and nobody stops to ask what it is costing.
It is costing everything.
“A team cannot out-execute a lack of clarity from the top. It can only absorb it, and absorbing it is exhausting work.”
The costume of strategy
When leaders describe what is wrong in their organizations, they almost always reach for the language of strategy. The strategy is not working. The strategy needs a refresh. The strategy has not been communicated well. I have sat across the table from seasoned executives who were convinced their problem was strategic, and in most cases, it was not. It was a clarity problem wearing a strategy costume.
Strategy is downstream of clarity. Execution is downstream of strategy. Culture is downstream of execution. When the river dries up at the source, every village below it suffers, and the villagers blame each other for the drought. This is the quiet tragedy of a great many leadership teams — they are arguing about the color of the boat while the current carries them sideways.
Scripture puts it with characteristic bluntness. “For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” (1 Corinthians 14:8, KJV). Paul is talking about tongues and prophecy, but the principle rings true in any organization where leadership has become muddled. People do not oppose a clear direction nearly as often as they fail to find one.
Where the fog comes from
In my years working with leaders — pastors, small-town business owners, executives of companies most people will never hear of, a few they have — I have come to recognize three common sources of leadership fog. They are not dramatic. They are the ordinary erosion of a busy life.
The unexamined priority
A leader begins a season with three priorities. By the end of the first quarter, there are seven. By mid-year, there are fourteen, and the original three have quietly disappeared, replaced by whatever seemed urgent in the weeks between. Nobody made a decision to change direction. The direction simply drifted, the way a boat drifts when no one is at the rudder.
The team, watching all of this, stops trying to discern priority from the leader’s words and starts inferring it from the leader’s calendar. And the leader’s calendar, in most cases, is a very poor representation of what the leader actually believes is important.
The decision that was almost made
A great many leadership meetings end with a decision that was almost made. Everyone in the room has a slightly different understanding of what was actually settled. Some believe it was a yes. Some believe it was a yes with conditions. Some believe it was a deferral. Within a week, the ambiguity begins producing conflicting action. Within a month, two teams are working toward different versions of the same initiative, and the leader, when asked, will say with some frustration that this should not be happening.
It should be happening. It was always going to happen. The decision was never made clearly, and the organization filled the vacuum the way organizations always do — with interpretation, assumption, and quiet compensation.
The leader who is not settled in themselves
This is the hardest one, and the one I am most reluctant to write about, because it implicates all of us. A leader cannot produce clarity they do not possess. If the inner life is cluttered — with unresolved fear, with unprocessed disappointment, with an identity that is too tightly bound to outcomes — then clarity at the leadership level becomes nearly impossible. You cannot give away what you do not have. The organization drinks from the well of the leader’s own interior life, and if that well is cloudy, so is everything downstream.
“You cannot lead others into clarity you have not yet found in yourself.”
Three disciplines that restore clarity
There is no shortcut to clarity, but there are disciplines that make it more likely. None of them are complicated. All of them are hard.
Name the decision before you debate it
Before the next leadership meeting that matters, write a single sentence: “By the end of this conversation, we will have decided ____.” If you cannot complete that sentence, the meeting is not ready to happen. Postpone it. Gather what is missing. Come back when you can write the sentence.
I know leaders who have cut their meeting load in half using only this discipline. The meetings they kept were the ones that produced actual decisions. The meetings they cut were the ones that produced only the feeling of decisions, which is a different thing entirely.
Separate ambiguity from disagreement
When a team appears to disagree, the disagreement is often a mask for something quieter — an ambiguity that nobody has named. Two people are not arguing about the answer. They are operating on different assumptions about the question. Until somebody slows the conversation down long enough to ask what each person believes to be true, the argument will continue, and it will feel like friction, and it will not resolve.
James wrote that wisdom from above is “first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated” (James 3:17, KJV). Pure means unmixed. Unmuddled. Before a team can be peaceable, the leader has to be willing to sort the pure from the mixed — to distinguish what is actually being asked from all the things that feel like they are being asked.
Write the decision in your own words
When a decision is made, do not rely on meeting notes or decks to carry it. Write one paragraph, in your own voice, stating what was decided, why, and what happens next. Circulate it. Keep it. Refer back to it. If you cannot write it clearly, the decision is not as made as you believed it was, and the writing itself will expose that.
There is something about the discipline of writing in one’s own words that forces clarity. You cannot hide behind a bullet point. You cannot paper over a gap with jargon. The sentence either works or it does not, and if it does not, the decision has to be revisited before it can be communicated.
Leadership Reflection
• Where is there fog in your leadership right now that you have stopped noticing? What would it mean to name it plainly?
• Which recent decision in your organization is still producing confusion? What clarity was actually missing when it was made?
• What is the state of your own interior life — the well from which your team is drinking? Is it clear, or is it cloudy?
• If you wrote one paragraph this week describing what you believe God is calling you to lead toward, what would it say?
The long work of clear leadership
The leaders I most admire are rarely the loudest. They are the ones who, over years, have developed the discipline of removing fog before it thickens. They do it in themselves first — in prayer, in reading, in honest conversation with a few trusted people. They do it in their teams, by refusing to leave meetings with unclear decisions. They do it in their organizations, by writing plainly and saying hard things early.
This is not glamorous work. It is more like the work of a man who walks his fence line every week, not because anything is wrong, but because he knows what goes wrong when a fence is not walked. The sag in the wire. The loose post. The place where something got in.
Clarity is the fence line of leadership. You can walk it or you can wait for the trouble. The leaders who thrive over decades are almost always the ones who walk it, weekly, in the quiet of the early morning, before the sun has finished burning off the fog.
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A note from Lee: If any of this lands where you are right now, and you would value an unhurried conversation with someone whose job is to help you see clearly, the door is open. connect.msgresources.com/leadership-advisory
