Too Much Information, Too Little Direction
Most people think communication problems are caused by saying too little.
In my experience, the opposite is often true. Many organisations don't suffer from under-communication. They suffer from over-communication.
When uncertainty rises, leaders instinctively add more:
More context.
More nuance.
More explanation.
More updates.
More slides.
Take the current uncertainty surrounding the Strait of Hormuz.
For many organisations, it raises legitimate questions around logistics, fuel prices, contracts, supply chains, inflation, and customer confidence.
Imagine you're the CEO of a major European airline. Oil prices are moving sharply.
Analysts are publishing scenarios.
News channels are running hourly updates.
Employees are nervous.
Investors are nervous.
Customers are nervous.
The leadership team feels pressure to respond.
So they produce:
• a 25-page risk assessment
• weekly leadership briefings
• multiple fuel-price scenarios
• route-impact studies
• geopolitical intelligence summaries
• contingency documents
The organisation becomes extremely well informed. But then a pilot asks: "Are we changing routes or not?" A commercial manager asks: "Should I revise my forecasts?" An operations director asks: "What assumptions should I be working from?" Everyone has information. Nobody has direction.
You see where I'm going with this. Underneath all the analysis, all the scenarios, and all the updates, it's really about one thing: Decision clarity.
The intention is good, but I've sat through meetings where everyone understood the presentation and nobody understood the decision.
People leave informed, yet unsure. What are we actually doing? What matters now? What happens next?
The problem isn't information.
It's that information starts replacing direction.
The signal gets buried beneath the effort to cover every angle and satisfy every stakeholder.
Communication is not simply the transfer of knowledge.
It's the creation of alignment.
And sometimes the most valuable thing a leader can do is not add another slide, another explanation, or another caveat.
It's decide what can be left out.
And then state a direction clearly, even before certainty arrives.
Decision clarity is rarely a communication problem.
It’s usually a leadership problem that eventually appears in communication.
That’s one of the reasons I developed Executive Signal Calibration (ESC).
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