Postcards from the Field: Clarity First

Postcards from the Field is where I share brief field reports from my work with real leadership teams. Rather than polished case studies, these notes surface the moments that stop me mid-session and point to the everyday habits that shape performance when conditions are uncertain. My aim is to translate what I’m seeing in the field into practical value readers can apply in their own teams.

Last week, I was in North Carolina working with a group of health and well-being leaders. These were thoughtful, experienced people doing the kind of work that rarely fits neatly inside one function. Their work required coordination, shared judgment, and a steady ability to move forward even when the path was not perfectly clear.

At one point in the session, we were exploring a practical tool for reducing friction in team decision-making: labeling decisions as inform, consult, or co-create. I wrote recently about this habit in an earlier postcard, “Messy Decisions”, after seeing how quickly it resonated with a group of cross-functional operators in the food industry.

As we talked through the framework in North Carolina, one leader raised her hand and asked a killer question.

She said she was thinking about a working group she serves on, where decision labeling would absolutely help. But before they could even get there, she realized the group was missing something more basic. They were not fully aligned on what they were solving for. They did not have a shared picture of what “done” looked like. And they had not really clarified what “good” should mean once the work was complete.

So what comes first?

It was such a smart question, and an important one.

Teams that are trying to move quickly often reach for decision tools first. That makes sense. When work feels messy, it is natural to ask who decides, who gets input, and how the group should move. But decision clarity does not solve foundational clarity problems. If a team is not aligned on where it is headed, what it is trying to deliver, and what standard it is aiming for, then even a useful tool like decision labeling can only do so much.

Before teams label key decisions, they usually need clarity in three places.

The first is direction. What is the North Star for this piece of work? What are we actually trying to achieve together? If that is fuzzy, teams often end up having efficient conversations about slightly different goals.

The second is completion. What does “done” look like? What exactly needs to be true for this workstream, project, or decision to be considered complete? Without completion clarity, work has a way of lingering or getting reopened, because people are operating with different finish lines in mind.

The third is quality. What does “good” look like once the work is done? Not in a vague aspirational sense, but in the practical sense. What standard are we trying to meet? How polished, how thorough, how fast, how collaborative, how final? Teams can appear aligned on the task and still create friction because their quality bar is not actually shared.

Once those three elements are in place, decision labeling becomes much more powerful.

Now the team is not just deciding who weighs in. It is deciding in service of a shared direction, a shared finish line, and a shared standard. Inform, consult, and co-create become more than meeting labels. They become ways of moving work forward with less confusion and less rework.

This matters even more for cross-functional teams.

When people come together from different roles, functions, or areas of expertise, they often bring different assumptions about goals, pace, ownership, and standards.

That diversity can be a real strength. But it also means the group cannot skip the clarity work. Speed does not come from rushing past those conversations. It comes from having them early enough that the work can move cleanly later.

That was the real insight from the room in North Carolina.

For teams trying to move fast in complex environments, the sequence matters. Start by getting clear on where you are headed, what counts as done, and what good looks like. Then label the decisions that will help you get there.

When teams do that in the right order, decision-making gets simpler because the work itself is clearer.