Battling Chaos with Clarity

You’re reading an excerpt of Great Founders Write, by Ben Putano, writer, entrepreneur, and book publisher. He’s the founder of Damn Gravity Media, a publishing house that inspires and educates tomorrow’s great founders. Purchase now for lifetime access to the book and on-demand video course.

Being a startup founder is a stressful and lonely job. When the pressure is on, we tend to “act now and think later,” a survival instinct that keeps us safe from snakes … only to run straight into a den of lions.

In times of high pressure and uncertainty, one leadership trait is more valuable than any other: clarity.

Clear communication is the knife that cuts through chaos, giving you and your team a direction and a plan. It focuses your limited resources like a laser aimed at the single most important thing. Clarity brings sanity back to insane situations.

Meanwhile, a lack of clarity amplifies the chaos with every layer of management it passes through. Like a game of telephone, the message becomes so obscured it ceases to resemble the original intention.

In some high-stress situations, miscommunication means death. SWAT teams, emergency room staff, and air traffic control groups are some of the most effective teams on the planet. One reason is that they obsess over precise language. Every word and phrase means exactly one thing, and they always confirm with each other that they understand.

Miscommunication in business is not typically a life-or-death situation, but it can certainly kill your company.

Let’s go over Natalie’s message again. She used several words and phrases that lacked clear, singular meanings:

• “Status”—Natalie had the Stripe dashboard right in front of her, so what type of update was she looking for?

• “Keep up the pace”—Keep up the pace of what?

• “We’re going to get lapped”—Is Natalie talking about competitors, or is this a veiled threat to Miguel’s job?

• “Let me know what I can do to help”—What is Natalie really willing to do to help? This sounds more like an empty gesture than a genuine offer of support.

Miguel, when relaying the message to the growth and product teams, increased the confusion by using phrases like “Top priority” and “Keep pushing.”

Founders and startup leaders don’t intentionally send their teams into chaos with unclear communication. We assume (often wrongly) that everyone understands what we mean by certain phrases. You know what you mean when you say “top priority” but your product manager has a different definition.

Clear communication has never been more important, especially as more teams shift to distributed and remote work. You can no longer rely on body language, back channels, and the familiarity that comes from working in an office together.

What does clear writing look like, and how can you achieve clarity on a regular basis? A little planning before firing off that message goes a long way.