Narrative Strategy: Clarity is Kindness
I probably struggle with clarity more than I should admit. I like to sprinkle fancy adjectives, flowery motifs, and frilly alliteration into my communications to the point of distraction. Poetry is wonderful, but it’s not appropriate for every situation — especially in high-stakes, high-complexity environments. In fields where decisions can literally mean life or death, clarity is crucial.
But clarity is also context-specific. As a narrative strategist, when I’m working with teams to create something new or navigate something unprecedented, we are constantly moving through new contexts.
Clarity starts with identifying the stakeholders and understanding their unique perspectives in a given moment. It means observing body language and noticing how people are processing new information. Are they present in the room with me? Are they distracted? Are they actually able to hear the message I’m sharing?
For me, clarity in narrative strategy means making sure the message resonates with the people it’s meant for. It means not just communicating at people, but communicating with them. It’s listening, orienting, and shaping communication around what’s needed in the moment.
Clarity also means sharing hard, uncomfortable truths. Instead of dressing the truth in euphemisms, flattery, or other roundabout language that makes the messenger feel better while leaving the recipient confused, you have to be direct. Because clarity is respect for your audience and yourself. It’s an acknowledgment that we’re capable of handling tough realities. It’s knowing that truthfulness, in the right moment, is a kindness.
And yet, clarity is not the same thing as simplification. This is where I think people get tripped up. To be clear is not to flatten complexity until it becomes something cheap and shiny and false. It is not reducing reality into a slogan just because slogans are easier to repeat. It is not pretending uncertainty doesn’t exist because certainty sounds more convincing in a room.
Real clarity can hold complexity. It can name competing priorities. It can acknowledge risk, ambiguity, and tension without collapsing under the weight of them. In fact, that’s often the job. Especially in moments of change, people do not need a polished performance of certainty nearly as much as they need a truthful orientation. They need to understand what is happening, why it matters, what is known, what is not yet known, and what comes next.
I think that’s part of why clarity is so difficult. It asks more of us than just better word choice. It demands discernment. It demands honesty. It asks us to separate what is essential from what is ornamental, what is useful from what is self-indulgent, what truly serves the audience from what merely serves our own desire to sound intelligent, nuanced, or profound.
I say this as someone who genuinely loves language. I love words that shimmer a bit. I love writing that makes people feel something in their bodies. I love a metaphor that opens up a whole new way of seeing. But when the stakes are high, clarity has to take precedence over performance. The point is not to impress people with the elegance of your language. The point is to help them see.
And seeing is no small thing.
To help someone see clearly in a moment of change is to help them orient themselves inside uncertainty. It is to reduce unnecessary friction. It is to create the conditions for better judgment, better decisions, better collaboration. Sometimes clarity sounds inspiring. Sometimes it sounds plain. Sometimes it sounds like a firm no, or a difficult truth, or a simple sentence repeated three times because the room still hasn’t absorbed it.
This is also why clarity requires humility. You cannot be clear if you are more attached to your own expression than to your audience’s understanding. You cannot be clear if you refuse feedback from the room. You cannot be clear if you assume that because you said something, it has been understood in the way you intended.
Clarity is relational. It is tested in real time. You see it in people’s faces, in the questions they ask, in the hesitation after you finish speaking, in whether the next action becomes more obvious or more muddled. Clarity is not what we think we delivered. It is what other people are actually able to receive and use.
That means clarity often requires revision. Not because the audience is failing, but because communication is alive. People are bringing different histories, incentives, pressures, fears, and assumptions into the room. A message that lands with one group may create resistance in another. A framing that worked six months ago may be entirely wrong for the present moment. So clarity is not a fixed achievement. It is an ongoing practice of attunement.
Maybe that’s why I keep returning to it. Not because I’ve mastered it, but because I haven’t. Because I know how easy it is to hide behind language. How easy it is to mistake beauty for precision, or sophistication for usefulness. How tempting it is to say something adjacent to the truth instead of saying the truth itself.
But I also know that when clarity is present, you can feel it.
The room changes. People settle. The signal comes through. What felt tangled begins to loosen. The next step becomes visible. Not because everything is suddenly easy or resolved, but because something real has been named, and named in a way that people can actually work with.
That, to me, is part of the deeper work of narrative strategy. Not just crafting messages that sound good, but shaping language that helps people move. Language that creates coherence without denial. Language that makes room for complexity while still giving people a way forward. Language that respects the moment, the audience, and the truth.
So yes, I still love the occasional flourish. I still have a soft spot for language that dances a little. But more and more, I think clarity is its own kind of artistry. Harder, cleaner, less decorative. An art of precision. An art of attention. An art of saying what must be said in a way that can truly be heard.
And in the environments that matter most, that kind of clarity is not just good communication.
It is care.