Clarity Is Kindness
Vagueness does not eliminate the cost of a hard message; it transfers that cost from the speaker who will not commit to the listener who has to act — which is why clarity is a moral duty before it is a stylistic one.
From the Founder
I once cost myself more than twenty thousand dollars by being nice. We had two employees and not enough budget to keep both at full salary. I went to them, I explained the situation, and with their consent I cut both salaries in half. Everyone in that room understood exactly what was happening. The people I did not tell were the administrators of the program our funding came from, because I did not want that conversation. I told myself I was protecting jobs. I was protecting myself. Months later we had to pay the money back, and I paid it out of my own pocket. Here is what it taught me, and I would rather you learn it from my bank account than yours: the sentence you will not say to keep a room comfortable still gets paid for. Usually by somebody who never agreed to pay it.
Executive Summary
Most leaders treat clarity as a communication skill and vagueness as a harmless habit. This lesson argues that vagueness is neither harmless nor neutral: it is a transfer of cost. The speaker who will not commit keeps his options, his deniability, and his comfort, and hands the interpretation work, the delay, and the eventual consequence to the person who has to act. Scripture treats plain speech as an obligation — yes meaning yes, the vision inscribed so a reader can move on it, the bugle that must not sound indistinct. The research explains why even honest leaders fail at it. And the accountability point is the sharp one: a leader who cannot be pinned down cannot be held to account, which is frequently the reason he cannot be pinned down.
Learning Objectives
- Explain the Fog Tax — how unclear communication transfers cost from speaker to listener — and identify its four common instruments
- Ground the duty of plain speech in Scripture, including the original-language force of Habakkuk 2:2 and 1 Corinthians 14:9
- Account for the curse of knowledge and explain why self-assessed clarity is systematically unreliable
- Apply the Repeatable Sentence test to your own policy, decision, or message — including honest statement of the limits of your authority
Teaching Manuscript
The Bugle That Nobody Could Follow
Module 5 closed with a man who knew that all things had been given into His hands, and who got up from the table, laid aside His garments, and took a towel. That is the summit of influence, and Lesson 5.8 asked you the only question that tests it: what do you do on the Tuesday when service stops paying and nobody is watching? Hold that question. It is still the right one. But now we add a second one, and it is more embarrassing than the first, because it can defeat a leader whose heart is entirely in the right place.
What happens when the servant cannot be understood? Influence that cannot be understood is not influence. It is noise with good intentions. You can love the people, refuse every shortcut, hold every conviction cleanly, and still leave a room in which eleven people walk out with twelve interpretations, and the whole moral achievement of Module 5 evaporates on contact with a badly built sentence.
You have watched this. A leader stands up and says the organization is going to be more intentional about alignment around its core priorities in the period ahead. Every head in the room nods. Nobody can tell you what changes on Monday. Nobody can tell you who is responsible, what is being stopped, or what happens if it is not done. The sentence has a subject and a verb and it commits to nothing, which is not an accident of style. It is the point of the sentence.
Paul saw the problem nineteen centuries earlier and reached for a military image. 'For if the bugle produces an indistinct sound, who will prepare himself for battle? So also you, unless you utter by the tongue speech that is clear, how will it be known what is spoken? For you will be speaking into the air' (1 Cor. 14:8-9, NASB 1995). Be honest about the context, because this academy does not stretch texts: Paul is addressing intelligibility in Corinthian worship, specifically the use of tongues without interpretation. He is not writing a memo standard. But the principle he states to make his case is general, and he states it as an argument he expects his readers to grant immediately.
Notice what he chose. A bugle is not decoration; it is a command instrument. On an ancient field, the call told men whether to form, advance, hold, or withdraw. An indistinct call does not produce a slightly worse formation. It produces men standing still while the line breaks somewhere else. Vagueness there is not a stylistic weakness. It is a functional failure with a body count. And that is the claim this lesson is going to make in ordinary terms: unclear speech does not make the cost of a hard message disappear. It moves the cost onto somebody who did not choose it. I call that the Fog Tax, and every leader levies it or refuses to.
The Fog Tax
Here is the mechanism. Every sentence you leave vague is a piece of work you decline to do, handed to the listener as a bill. He now has to guess your meaning, guess your intent, guess whether the thing you almost said applies to him, and then act anyway, because the work does not stop while he interprets you. You kept your options. He carries your ambiguity into a decision. That is the tax, and it is regressive: it falls hardest on the people with the least power to come back and ask you what you meant.
Leaders levy it with four instruments. The first is abstraction that names no actor — we need better collaboration across the organization — which describes a weather pattern rather than a decision. The second is the agentless construction, and it is the native tongue of institutional failure: mistakes were made, the ball was dropped, the process broke down. Grammar is being used to delete a person. The third is the hedge stack, where every qualifier is an exit reserved in advance: we may want to consider potentially exploring some version of that at the appropriate time. The fourth is jargon, which is the most flattering of the four, because it makes the speaker sound credentialed while informing nobody. Every one of these can be produced by a decent person under pressure. That is exactly why you have to name them.
Now the moral argument, and it is the spine of this lesson. Consider the manager who knows an employee's performance is failing and cannot bring himself to say it. He gives feedback that is warm, general, and technically true. He tells himself he is being kind. Eighteen months later that employee is let go, and in the exit conversation he says the sentence that should follow the manager for the rest of his career: nobody ever told me. The manager purchased eighteen months of his own comfort with eighteen months of another man's career. Kindness was the word he used. Cowardice was the transaction.
Then the accountability argument, which is sharper and belongs to public life especially. A leader who cannot be pinned down cannot be held to account. If your commitment is that you will work tirelessly to address the affordability crisis, there is no future date on which anyone can demonstrate that you failed. There is nothing to measure. And I want you to consider the possibility — not as cynicism, but as diagnosis — that this is frequently the purpose of the sentence rather than a side effect of it. Vagueness is not merely a symptom of unclear thinking. It is often a very clear form of thinking about self-protection.
So here is the test, and it is uncomfortable by design. For any commitment you make in public or in private: could a reasonable person, a year from now, holding only your words and the record, prove you wrong? If the answer is no, you did not make a commitment. You made a noise shaped like one. Before you read on, find the last one you made. You know which one it is.
Yes, Yes and No, No
Scripture treats plain speech as a moral category, not a communication technique, and it starts where you would least expect: in a dispute about oaths. 'But let your statement be, Yes, yes or No, no; anything beyond these is of evil' (Matt. 5:37, NASB 1995). Read against Matthew 23:16-22 the background comes into focus. Jesus is describing a graded oath economy — swearing by the temple counted for less than swearing by the gold of the temple, and everyone involved understood the tiers. The system was not primarily about lying. It was about calibrating in advance how binding you intended to be, which is precisely what a hedge stack does in a modern meeting.
The Greek is doubled: nai nai, ou ou. The doubling is not emphasis for its own sake, and James 5:12 preserves the same standard in nearly the same words. The point is that a follower of Jesus should have no gradations of bindingness, because his plain word already carries the weight a sworn one would. Understand what that does to a leader. It removes the entire vocabulary of the strategically non-committal. You do not get a tier of speech that sounds like agreement and does not obligate you.
The clearest command on this subject in the Old Testament rests on a single Hebrew word, so take it directly. Habakkuk 2:2, NASB 1995: 'Record the vision And inscribe it on tablets, That the one who reads it may run.' The verb behind 'inscribe' is ba'er, from a root whose semantic range runs through engraving, making distinct, and making plain — the same verb appears in Deuteronomy 27:8 in the phrase ba'er hetev, commonly rendered very distinctly or very plainly. So the command is not merely write it down. It is write it down so plainly that it functions without you standing there to explain it. Commentators do differ on the final clause: some read the running as a herald carrying the message, others as a reader taking it in at a glance while in motion. Either reading lands in the same place for our purposes — the vision is inscribed for somebody else's use, not for the author's records.
Paul's word in the bugle passage does similar work. The phrase rendered 'speech that is clear' turns on eusemon, formed from eu, well, and sema, a sign or mark — well-marked, distinctly signaled, unmistakable in what it indicates. It is not a word about eloquence. It is a word about whether the signal can be read.
Now the honest objection, because it is a good one and it will occur to any careful reader. Jesus taught in parables, and Mark 4:11-12 says outsiders received everything in parables so that seeing they would see and not perceive. That looks like deliberate obscurity from the model this academy holds up. Take it seriously. Two things can be said, and I will label them as interpretation rather than proof. First, the parables are not fog. They are concrete, vivid, and grammatically simple; what is demanding about them is not the language but the decision they force. Fog hides a claim, while a parable delivers a claim you would rather not have received. Second, Mark 4:11-12 is among the most contested passages in the Gospels, and mainstream commentators divide over whether it describes purpose or consequence, with the Isaiah 6 citation behind it complicating both readings. Module 6 closes with a full lesson on the parable standard. What I will not do is let a disputed verse become a permission slip for the sentence you are avoiding.
Without scrolling back: state the Fog Tax in one sentence, and name the four instruments leaders use to levy it.
The Curse of Knowing
Suppose you are entirely honest and genuinely intend to be understood. You will still be worse at this than you think, and the reason is cognitive rather than moral. In 1989 Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber published an experimental study in the Journal of Political Economy showing that better-informed agents could not adequately discount their own private information when predicting the judgments of less-informed others. They named it the curse of knowledge. Once you know a thing, you cannot reliably simulate a mind that does not know it. Your sense that a sentence was clear is being generated by information your listener does not have.
The famous illustration of this is a study you have probably heard secondhand: Elizabeth Newton's tappers-and-listeners experiment, in which people tapped out well-known tunes on a table and dramatically overestimated how many listeners would identify them — predicting roughly half, with only a tiny fraction actually succeeding. I am going to handle this the way this academy handles everything. It is a 1990 Stanford dissertation, popularized widely through Chip and Dan Heath's Made to Stick, and it has been repeated in leadership literature far more often than it has been examined. I offer it as an illustration of the curse of knowledge, not as evidence for it. The evidence is the experimental literature that followed Camerer and his colleagues. If you catch me citing a vivid study loosely, you should say so, and you should apply the same standard to the vivid studies you like.
Two further findings are worth having, described conservatively. Daniel Oppenheimer reported in Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2006 that replacing ordinary words with needlessly complex ones lowered readers' judgments of the author's intelligence — the studies were modest in scale, but the direction fits a broad processing-fluency literature. And readability formulas deserve a caution most executives never hear: instruments of the Flesch-Kincaid family measure surface features such as word and sentence length. They are proxies. They do not measure whether anyone understood anything, and a document can score well and still be incomprehensible. The plain-language movement has better grounds than its critics allow and weaker grounds than its advocates claim; that Congress passed a Plain Writing Act in 2010 requiring federal agencies to write documents the public can use is a fact about policy, not a finding about comprehension.
Put those together and you arrive at the executive consequence. You cannot audit your own clarity from the inside. Your confidence that you were clear is manufactured by the very knowledge that disqualifies you as a judge. So clarity has to be tested externally, and the cheapest reliable instrument in existence is the teach-back: before the meeting ends, have somebody who has to act on the decision say it back in his own words, not yours. Not do you have questions, which reliably produces the answer no. Walk me through what you are going to do Monday.
Apply it now, honestly. Think of the last significant thing you communicated — a memo, a directive, a sermon, a policy rollout. If you called the three people it landed on and asked each of them to state what you decided and what changes as a result, would you get one answer or three? You already suspect the answer. The suspicion is the useful part.
The Budget Nobody Could Read
In 1946 George Orwell published 'Politics and the English Language,' and it is worth reading what he actually argued rather than the version that circulates. His claim was not that English is aesthetically degraded. It was causal and political: that language decays partly from political causes, that the decay then becomes a cause in its own right by making sloppy thought easier, and that political writing in particular is largely the defense of the indefensible — which forces the writer into euphemism, question-begging, and what he called cloudy vagueness. His most quoted sentence says political language is designed 'to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.' Two pieces of honesty attach. Orwell attached his own escape clause to his famous rules, telling the reader to break any of them sooner than say anything outright barbarous. And linguists — Geoffrey Pullum most persistently — have argued that Orwell's rules are self-violating and his linguistic claims shaky. The moral diagnosis survives the linguistic criticism. Take the diagnosis.
New York supplies the case in its purest form. Through the late 1960s and early 1970s the city financed ordinary operating expenses through instruments that were never designed to carry them, rolled short-term paper forward, and carried revenue on the books that had little prospect of ever arriving. By the spring of 1975 the banks would no longer market the city's notes, and the machinery of rescue that followed — the Municipal Assistance Corporation in June, the Emergency Financial Control Board in September — existed because nobody could any longer pretend not to know. In 1977 the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a report concluding that the city's disclosures to investors had been misleading. Read the whole episode as a communication case and the lesson is exact: this was not primarily a conspiracy of liars. It was a system of documents constructed so that no individual ever had to say the deficit out loud in a sentence somebody could quote back to him.
Now the counter-case, because clarity has a failure mode of its own and a leader who ignores it becomes a demagogue. On October 29, 1975, President Ford told the National Press Club he would veto any bill providing a federal bailout for New York City. The next morning the Daily News ran the headline that entered American memory: Ford to City: Drop Dead. He never said those words. The headline was vastly clearer than the speech and meaningfully less accurate, and it did more political work than either the speech or the accurate reporting. Hold both halves of that. Clarity is a duty owed to the truth, not a license to compress a thing until it distorts. Ed Koch is the same lesson in a person: his plainness gave the city an unmistakable public voice and gave the city something to hold onto during the 1980 transit strike, and the identical instinct produced remarks about his fellow New Yorkers that wounded people and narrowed him. Plain is not the same as careless, and it is not the same as unkind.
So here is the executive standard, and for a candidate it is the whole ballgame. New York City's expense budget — the Mayor's Office of Management and Budget put the Fiscal Year 2026 Executive Budget at roughly a hundred and fifteen billion dollars — is published in documents technically available to every citizen and readable by almost none. Availability is not disclosure. The test I want you to adopt is the Repeatable Sentence: can an ordinary voter, having heard you once, accurately repeat your policy to a neighbor the next day? If not, you have not communicated it. You have filed it. And the test has a truth clause that matters more than the clarity clause. We are going to fix the subway is a beautifully repeatable sentence and it is not yours to say, because the MTA is run by the state, not by City Hall. Being clear about the limits of your own authority is not a weakness in a message. It is the only version of the message that survives contact with governing.
That is Lesson 6.1. Clarity is kindness because the alternative is a tax you levy on people who cannot refuse it. But clarity by itself is not enough, and you can already feel the gap: a leader can be perfectly clear about eleven separate things and still leave a room where nobody knows what matters most. Which is Lesson 6.2, and the harder discipline — because clarity mostly requires courage, and what comes next requires you to cut good material you love.
Why can a leader not audit his own clarity from the inside, and what does that force him to do instead?
Through the Six Lenses
Evidence levels labeled per the Truth & Intellectual Integrity standard.
Biblical
Matthew 5:37 abolishes graded bindingness — nai nai, ou ou — with James 5:12 preserving the same standard. Habakkuk 2:2 turns on ba'er, whose range covers engraving and making plain (compare Deuteronomy 27:8, ba'er hetev). First Corinthians 14:9 uses eusemon, eu plus sema: well-marked, unmistakably signaled. Colossians 4:6 supplies the limit — speech with grace, seasoned with salt — so plainness is never licensed to become cruelty.
Philosophical
Grice's maxim of manner asks speakers to be perspicuous: avoid obscurity, avoid ambiguity, be brief and orderly. Williamson's knowledge norm of assertion goes further — assert only what you know — which makes the hedge stack a confession as much as a shield. The steelman for ambiguity is real: diplomacy, negotiation, and pastoral care sometimes require deliberate imprecision to keep parties at the table. The test is whose interest the imprecision serves.
Scientific
Camerer, Loewenstein & Weber (Journal of Political Economy, 1989) demonstrated that informed agents cannot adequately discount private information when modeling less-informed others, and named the curse of knowledge. Newton's tappers-and-listeners demonstration is a 1990 dissertation popularized secondhand and is offered here as illustration only. Oppenheimer (2006) found needless complexity lowered judged author intelligence. Readability formulas measure word and sentence length — proxies, not comprehension.
Historical
New York's mid-1970s fiscal collapse was preceded by accounting and disclosure practices that let officials avoid stating the deficit plainly; an SEC staff report in 1977 concluded the city's investor disclosures were misleading. The Daily News headline of October 30, 1975 was clearer than Ford's actual Press Club remarks and less accurate — clarity misused. Koch's plain public voice both steadied a demoralized city and wounded parts of it.
Influence
Ambiguity is a manipulation surface. A vague commitment lets every listener hear the version he wants, which manufactures agreement that does not exist and collapses on delivery. It also defeats accountability, since nothing measurable was promised. Lesson 5.1's Daylight Test applies directly: if stating your meaning plainly would cost you the room's assent, the assent was never yours — you were borrowing it against a debt somebody else pays.
Executive
The teach-back — having the person who must act restate the decision in his own words — is the cheapest reliable clarity audit available. Written decision memos that name the decision, the owner, and the date outperform meeting consensus, because ambiguity survives conversation and dies on a page. For public office, apply the Repeatable Sentence test, including its truth clause: never make a repeatable promise your actual authority cannot redeem.
Case Study
New York, 1975: The Budget Nobody Was Required to Read
SITUATION. By the spring of 1975 New York City could no longer sell its short-term notes. Years of financing ordinary operating costs through instruments not designed for them, rolling debt forward, and carrying receivables of doubtful value had produced a gap that the city's own published documents did not state in any sentence a citizen could quote. CONSTRAINTS. Mayor Abraham Beame inherited the accounting practices rather than inventing them. Disclosing the position plainly risked accelerating the collapse it described; not disclosing it risked selling securities on a false picture. Albany and Washington each held leverage City Hall did not. DECISION. The city continued marketing notes on existing disclosure practice until the market closed the option, after which the state imposed the Municipal Assistance Corporation in June and the Emergency Financial Control Board in September. ANALYSIS. In 1977 the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission concluded the city's disclosures to investors had been misleading. Note the mechanism rather than the villainy: no official had to lie, because the documents were built so that no one ever had to say the number plainly. Opacity distributed the guilt until nobody held enough to act. DISCUSSION. What number in your organization is technically available, formally disclosed, and stated nowhere in a sentence anyone could repeat — and who benefits from that?
Reflection Questions
- What is the one sentence you have been rewording for weeks to avoid saying? Write the plain version now, in under fifteen words.
- Who in your organization currently pays your Fog Tax — whose work slows down or gets redone because your instructions preserve your options?
- Recall the last time someone was blindsided by a consequence you saw coming. What exactly had you said, and what had you carefully not said?
- Which of the four instruments — abstraction, agentless construction, hedge stack, jargon — is your personal default under pressure, and what does it protect you from?
Practical Exercise — The Fog Audit
Take the three most consequential things you have written or said in the last month — a memo, an email announcing a decision, a public statement, a sermon point, a policy summary. For each, do three passes. Pass one: circle every agentless construction and rewrite it with a named human subject. Pass two: strike every hedge and read the sentence aloud without them; if the unhedged version is false, you have found something you do not actually believe, and if it is true, you have found something you were afraid to own. Pass three: give the rewritten version to one person who must act on it and ask them to tell you, in their own words, what they will do differently Monday. Record the gap between what you meant and what they said. Bring the widest gap to Lesson 6.2.
Assessment
This Week’s Commitment
Name one message you have been softening — a performance problem, a decision already made, a commitment you cannot keep, a number that is worse than people think. Write the plain version in one sentence, name the person, and put a date on the calendar this week. Who, what, when.
Identity statement to carry this week: “I do not buy my own comfort with someone else's confusion. When I have something hard to say, I say it plainly, early, and to the person's face — because the people I lead have to act on my words, and they deserve words they can act on.”
Discussion Questions
- Steelman deliberate ambiguity: name a situation in diplomacy, negotiation, or pastoral care where imprecision genuinely serves the listener rather than the speaker. What distinguishes it from the Fog Tax?
- Orwell's diagnosis of political language has survived while his linguistic prescriptions have been substantially criticized. What does that pattern teach you about citing a persuasive essay as evidence?
- Where is the line between plain speech and cruelty? Name a case where a leader you admire crossed it, and say what the honest version would have sounded like.
Reading List
- Matthew 5:33-37; 1 Corinthians 14:6-12; Habakkuk 2:1-3 — plain speech as obligation
- George Orwell, 'Politics and the English Language' (1946)
- Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein & Martin Weber, 'The Curse of Knowledge in Economic Settings: An Experimental Analysis,' Journal of Political Economy 97 (1989)
- Daniel Oppenheimer, 'Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity,' Applied Cognitive Psychology 20 (2006)
- H. P. Grice, 'Logic and Conversation' (1975) — the maxim of manner
- Joseph M. Williams and Joseph Bizup, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace
- Securities and Exchange Commission, Staff Report on Transactions in Securities of the City of New York (1977)