My first week at Volvo, nobody told me what to do.
I don’t mean they forgot. I mean the onboarding was: “Just follow this guy, Lars, and do what he does.” That was it. No brief. No structure. No explanation of what the role actually required. Lars walked me through the departments. He pointed at people: “These are the software people. These are the purchasing team, they’re this way.” I inherited someone else’s map of the organization before I’d had a chance to draw my own.
The Swedish politeness was real. Everyone was friendly. But friendly and clear are two different things. I kept hearing a phrase: “Someone has to do something about it.” And people would sit there, nodding, wondering: who is “someone”? What does “has to” mean? When?
“Figure it out” was the operating model. And at the time, I didn’t question it. I assumed that was just how things worked.
* * *
Years later, I see the same thing in every organization I work with. And I’ve started calling it what it is: the Clarity Gap.
The executive says: “They’re not strategic enough. They lack business acumen.”
The middle manager says: “I was never told what the actual priority is. The strategy was communicated once, at a town hall, in language designed for the board. Nobody checked whether it arrived at the level where it needs to become action.”
Both are telling the truth. The executive really does see a lack of strategic thinking in the middle. And the middle really was left to figure it out without a clear direction. The gap sits between them, invisible to both.
Here’s what makes it structural. I’ve found that organizations consistently confuse two kinds of clarity. The first is destination clarity: where are we going, what do we stand for, what is the target. That should be non-negotiable. The second is route clarity: how we get there. That should be flexible, because conditions change.
Most organizations get this exactly backwards. They’re fuzzy about where they’re going but rigid about how to get there.
I saw this play out inside Volvo. Eight project leaders. Same title. Same position on the org chart. Each doing the job completely differently based on personal strengths. I went to the interpersonal side, working supplier relationships, unsticking communication problems. A colleague picked up his laptop and went down to the workshop to fix software bugs himself. Everyone was operating in their own strength, and it felt like freedom.
But were we maximizing what the team could do? Almost certainly not. Nobody had designed the complementarity. It happened by accident. And in predictable, repeatable work, accidental complementarity is just waste with a friendly face.
There’s another version of this that still drives me a little crazy. I worked with a software tuning team. I asked a straightforward question: “When are you ready?” Their answer: “When do we need to be ready?” No definition of done. No target. “We can always improve more.” Work expands to fill the time available. Without a clear finish line, improvement is infinite (and infinitely expensive).
The Clarity Gap is the first muscle in the organizational core. And when it’s weak, everything downstream suffers. Alignment becomes guesswork. Accountability becomes impossible. You can’t hold people accountable for outcomes they were never clearly set up to achieve.
The executive looks at the middle and sees people who aren’t thinking strategically. The middle looks up and sees a strategy that arrived as a slogan and was supposed to become a plan. Somewhere between those two views, clarity disappeared. And nobody noticed until the results didn’t come.
More to come.
Florin
P.S. Next edition: The Alignment Gap. When everyone knows where they’re going, but those destinations aren’t the same place.