Why does clarity get deferred?
I hear a version of the same sentence again and again when I speak to leaders:
‘We’ll come back to this when things calm down.’
It’s usually said with good intent. There’s a business to run, people to look after, decisions piling up. Clarity feels important - just not urgent.
And yet, ‘when things calm down’ rarely arrives.
Not because leaders are careless or avoidant. But because clarity has a habit of being framed as something you earn after growth, change, or stability - rather than something that enables them.
Clarity feels optional. Until it isn’t.
In many organisations, clarity is treated as a refinement task:
We’ll articulate our purpose once the strategy is set
We’ll revisit positioning after this phase of growth
We’ll align the story once the dust settles
The problem is that while clarity is being deferred, decisions aren’t.
Strategy moves forward. Culture forms habits. Markets draw conclusions.
And a story takes shape - quietly, cumulatively, without permission.
Busy-ness is not the real reason.
Leaders often tell me they don’t have time for this work right now. But time isn’t usually the constraint.
What’s harder to name is that clarity:
Forces trade-offs
Surfaces tensions
Makes implicit choices explicit
And that can feel uncomfortable in organisations that have learned to keep moving as a way of coping with complexity.
Activity becomes a proxy for progress. Momentum replaces meaning.
The cost of deferral is rarely immediate.
This is why clarity keeps getting postponed - the consequences don’t show up straight away.
They surface later as:
A brand that feels fragmented but ‘can’t quite explain why’
A culture that’s busy but misaligned
A leadership team pulling in slightly different directions
A market that doesn’t fully understand what you stand for
By the time these symptoms appear, leaders often feel they’ve outgrown the moment for clarity - when in fact, they’ve been living with its absence for years.
Story doesn’t wait for permission
Whether you define it or not, your organisation is telling a story.
It’s told through:
What you prioritise
What you tolerate
What you invest in, and what you avoid
How decisions get made under pressure
This is the story people will remember. Not the one you intended, but the one your behaviour made believable.
By 2026, every business will have a story attached to it. The only question is whether it was shaped deliberately - or inherited by default.
A quieter question worth asking
Instead of asking ‘When will we have time to get clearer?’ A more useful question might be:‘If nothing meaningfully changes, what story will people be telling about us in a year’s time?’
Not as a threat. Not as a prediction. But as a mirror.
Because clarity isn’t a reward for calm. It’s often what creates it!