My guest for Episode #319 is Karen Martin, whose most recent book is Clarity First: How Smart Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance. She was previously a guest on Episodes #151, #190, and #285.
Karen is an author of many books on Lean, quality, and performance excellence. She is also a speaker and a consultant with a B.S. in Microbiology from Pennsylvania State University and an M.A. in Education from California State University, Bakersfield. Read her full bio.
Karen explains why clarity is essential to organizational success and why many leaders struggle with it. She describes clarity as concise, easy-to-understand information that cuts through the “fog” of ambiguity, helping people and organizations perform at higher levels.
Karen and Mark examine why some leaders avoid clarity–often because the truth demands action and can feel uncomfortable. They discuss how ambiguity, often rooted in fear, undermines safety, performance, and trust. Drawing from both healthcare and corporate examples, Karen highlights how lack of clarity in priorities, processes, and performance metrics leads to confusion and poor outcomes, while clarity creates alignment and accountability.
The conversation also introduces Karen's framework of the five key elements of clarity–Purpose, Priorities, Process, Performance, and People–and how they can guide leaders in improving focus and execution. Along the way, Mark and Karen connect her ideas to his book Measures of Success, reinforcing the link between clear performance measurement and meaningful improvement. This episode is a candid and practical look at how leaders can move from ambiguity to clarity and why doing so is essential for long-term organizational health.
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Topics and notes for this episode:
- Find Karen online:
- Karen's new book
- What is Clarity? Concise and easy to understand…
- Are leaders sometimes not comfortable with clarity?
- Clarity is clearly better than ambiguity, right?
- Medical errors in healthcare… lack of knowledge about this, ambiguity about it
- What recommendations does Karen have to help shift from ambiguity to clarity in these areas?
- Purpose
- Priorities
- Process
- Performance
- People
- Is there a lack of clarity around the connections between process and performance?
- How can we gain more clarity around the question of what to measure?
- How there's not clarity in tables of tables or grids of numbers, where there's more clarity in charts and graphs
- You can't blame somebody for what they haven't been taught
- Can a company just ask people to have a high level of comfort with ambiguity? Is that a plus to have a high tolerance for ambiguity?
- Ambiguity vs. uncertainty?
- What books are next for each of us?
Videos of Karen on Clarity:
Transcript
Introduction
Announcer:
Welcome to the Lean Blog Podcast. Visit our website at www.leanblog.org. Now, here's your host, Mark Graban.
Mark Graban:
Hi, this is Mark Graban. Welcome to episode 319 of the podcast. It's October 1st, 2018. My guest today is Karen Martin, whose most recent book is titled Clarity First: How Smart Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance.1 Karen is the author of many books on Lean, quality, and performance excellence. She's also a speaker and consultant.
So what is clarity? How can we work toward creating less fog and more clarity in organizations? We'll talk about things like that, along with a bit of discussion about clarity in performance metrics, as I write about in my recent book, Measures of Success. If you'd like to get links to Karen's website, her books, and more information about her and the topics we're talking about today, you can go to www.leanblog.org/319.
Well, Karen, it's great to have you back on the podcast here for the fourth time as a guest. How are you today?
Karen Martin:
I'm doing well, Mark, thank you. It's really great to be back for a fourth time. How are you doing?
Mark Graban:
I'm doing well, and I'm excited to talk about your new book, Clarity First. To set the stage for listeners who maybe haven't heard the previous podcasts: in episode 151, we talked about your previous book, The Outstanding Organization; in episode 190, we talked about the book Value Stream Mapping. And in our last discussion just over a year ago, episode 285, Karen, you had posed an interesting, provocative question: “Is Lean dead?” I think after we talked about that for a while, we shared the conclusion that it's not dead. Do I remember that right?
Karen Martin:
Yes, it's definitely not dead.
The Link Between Lean and Clarity
Mark Graban:
It seems like it's more a matter of organizations figuring out how to improve their practice of Lean. You've been thinking about those questions with some of your more recent books, right? What are your thoughts?
Karen Martin:
Yeah. What really compelled me to write Clarity First was, well, first of all, clarity got a lot of attention in The Outstanding Organization, and I felt I needed to go deeper. But then I started putting a lot together as far as top performance and the methods for getting that performance, including measurement. I discovered that when you strip away all the language and the acronyms around Lean management, it really is all about achieving a high level of clarity. And that's everything from the way the people are managed to the way the work is being done.
I've concluded, in my not-huge-but-pretty-good data set, that there's ample evidence that where Lean falls apart is because the leaders that come into an organization simply aren't comfortable with that level of clarity. And that's a large reason why some of the success stories, sadly, go the other way.
Mark Graban:
I'd like to come back and have you elaborate on the idea of leaders not being comfortable with clarity. But first off, how do you define clarity? If you can help us get some clarity around “clarity.”
Karen Martin:
Exactly. It is information in any format that's concise and easy to understand. It's going away from messaging that makes you go, “What does that mean? What are we supposed to do? What are our priorities? What's our purpose? What's the problem?” Those kinds of questions create this fundamental fog that exists in a lot of situations. Clarity is that concise and easy-to-understand messaging that enables people, teams, and whole organizations to perform at very high levels.
Mark Graban:
And what would be an example of that fog? Would it be an organization having a stated strategy, mission, and vision where people in the organization don't know it, or there are vague terms?
Karen Martin:
Absolutely. One of the things I've learned is that organizations are more or less somewhat clear on their mission–what they do. Where they get very confused, and where there can be absolute non-alignment in the executive team, is around what the purpose of the organization is and what the vision is, which have to be linked or they don't make sense. And so when the leaders aren't clear about it, then that's the biggest problem. There's no chance that the people in the organization will be clear if the leaders are unclear. When I start asking people, “Why are you in business?” it's somewhat surprising how many people can't answer that question.
Why Leaders Aren't Comfortable with Clarity
Mark Graban:
It seems like it would be an obvious preference: clarity is better than ambiguity. So, coming back, I'd be curious for you to talk more about why leaders wouldn't be comfortable with clarity. Is it because they're maybe trying to gloss over the real reality?
Karen Martin:
It could be that. So I divide people into being either clarity pursuers, clarity avoiders, or the clarity blind. A clarity avoider can get all the way into very sociopathic and criminal behavior, but it tends to be in that uncomfortable state. Here's the thing about the truth, which is what clarity is closely linked to: when you know the truth, it's almost painful to not take action on it. You can have visceral pain if you know the truth and you can't take action on it.
When you live in a more ambiguous state and it's a little foggy, it mitigates the pain because you can kind of not really know for sure. And so there is this non-action pass that you get in living in ambiguity. This is true in personal lives as well as in business lives. Was it Jack Nicholson that yelled, “You can't handle the truth!”?
Mark Graban:
Yep, it was Jack Nicholson.
Karen Martin:
Yeah. And that's who he yelled at, right? So it's almost like this not wanting to know. And we see this, and I'm sure you see it as well, in senior leaders that will punish people for telling the truth of a situation.
Mark Graban:
Well, no. And we see scenarios in both the political realm and the business world of certain executives that are always trying to create distractions. If people start pointing out, “Boy, our business has a failed strategy,” we'll just raise some other issue and create a distraction, right?
Karen Martin:
Yeah, “It's the marketplace, it's this, it's that, it's the political environment.” It's so interesting to see how people frame a reality that, if you dig deep enough, is not at all the reality that they're communicating. It's a pretty widespread problem. And it permeates all the way down to the lowest levels of an organization. If you don't have a leader who honors and values clarity and has that as his or her operating mode, much of the time… none of us are always clear, but I do think that people have a bias toward tending to operate that way or tending not to. But the people who tend to not operate that way, once they see the value in it and once they even have the self-awareness that they're not operating with clarity, that's when the light bulbs turn on and the floodgates open and performance can really soar.
Fear, Ambiguity, and Safety in Healthcare
Mark Graban:
Yeah. What you're saying makes me think of the difference in organizational cultures. In one culture, people are thanked for pointing out problems because that's the first step in solving them. And then I've been in different workplaces where if you brought up a problem, you were a troublemaker. It seems like one example of clarity might be the Toyota expression of “no problems is a problem.”
Karen Martin:
Yeah. And I also think that what Toyota has brought to the world is they've taken the emotionality out of a problem by saying, “Hey, it's a gap between where we are and where we need to be.” It's a gap. It's not like, “Oh my God, the sky is falling.” They take away the blame. They instill a less fearful organization. And I'm sure Dr. Deming is smiling from heaven at that. The more I work in organizations of all types, the more I see how prevalent fear is. And fear is very laced in having a very ambiguous workplace. To me, it's the root cause behind an ambiguous workplace.
Mark Graban:
One other thing that comes to mind is the lack of clarity around a really serious issue in healthcare. Here it is, 20 years after some of these Institute of Medicine reports were published, and I still go to organizations where Lean people honestly have no idea how many people are being harmed, if not killed, by process-related, preventable medical errors. And that just doesn't get talked about in a lot of health systems openly and honestly. It's more like if we don't talk about it, we don't have to stress over it.
Karen Martin:
Yeah. So I've been working in healthcare a little more lately, and I've been seeing a lot of common themes on how much lip service is given to safety and how little is actually being done about it. It's disheartening. I had the great fortune of working with Chevron for two years. They start every single meeting with a safety moment. There's not a meeting that starts without just going into the meeting. It's so much part of the DNA. And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, when you look at the number of people that die in the oil and gas industry every year and the number of people that are dying in healthcare, why is it not healthcare that's doing the safety moment every meeting? And why is it not healthcare that is getting riled up about safety? It boggles my mind.
Mark Graban:
And some organizations do have those daily safety huddles at an executive level, and there's a stronger focus.
Karen Martin:
I see safety huddles as well in many organizations, and some do better than others. But I do think that the safety huddles have gotten kind of… they've served this multiple purpose. And speaking of lack of clarity, they become this information sharing about all kinds of things. They've gotten a little morphed into something that is important, but it's gotten diluted so that it's not just about safety, which then exacerbates the problem that safety is not first and foremost in everyone's mind.
The Five Elements of Clarity
Mark Graban:
When there's low clarity or ambiguity in an organization, what recommendations do you have for leaders to try to improve that?
Karen Martin:
Well, I broke it into five different elements where I find clarity often lacking: Purpose, Priorities, Process, Performance, and People.
Every organization has a different level of clarity versus not in those different areas. So it might be purpose. Healthcare happens to be an industry that's actually fairly clear on their purpose. When it comes to priorities, well, I could talk for hours on the lack of clarity in priorities because I see it as a really big problem out there. Leaders not agreeing on the priorities, not agreeing on how they spend their money, not agreeing on the approach. And that just trickles down into middle managers and the front lines not knowing what they should be spending their time on.
And then we get into something that starts touching on your book, Measures of Success. And that's the whole… well, actually, process comes next. But when you get to performance, it's been fascinating for me to see how many organizations don't truly know how they're performing on any level other than financial. Operationally, not macro, not micro, nothing. And if they have any clarity around how they want to be performing, they don't necessarily know how to go about measuring that and how to go about improving it. Think about a football game with a blank scoreboard, and you're trying to figure out who's winning and what quarter it is.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, I mean, in a basketball game, they don't run a quarterly report at the end of every quarter. “By the way, you're up 12.”
Karen Martin:
Yeah, exactly. The refs, the coaches, and the team members themselves are studying the board to know, “Where are we? What do we need to do?” And there's just this fundamental lack of clarity around that at all levels of many organizations.
Clarity in Performance and Problem Solving
Mark Graban:
And I think there's, to use your term, a lack of clarity sometimes in the connection between process and performance. That's where in my book, I try to remind people of that old expression, “What gets measured, gets managed.” And a lot of times people don't really talk about what they mean by “managed.” We don't mean managing the metric that leads to people fudging the numbers or gaming the system. We need to improve the process or the system that generates those results.
Karen Martin:
Right. Yes. The corollary to “what gets measured gets managed” is “be careful what you measure.” Because to your point about gaming the metrics, there's just so much of that. I'll take healthcare, since you operate in that world pretty heavily. “Door-to-doc.” This metric just bugs the crap out of me because what I see happening in EDs all across the nation is they put doctors up close to the waiting area, they pull them out of the exam rooms, so they can meet a metric of door-to-doc within a certain number of minutes, and the patient never gets through the ED any faster.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, that's a great example of distorting the system. I try to make those connections within your framework between performance and problem-solving. If we're not at the level of performance where we need to be, people think about systematic improvement methods like A3 problem solving. There's a time when we see a gap in performance, we don't find the answer by asking, “Well, why was yesterday bad?” When we've got a consistent process, we need to look at improving the process instead of just reacting to the most recent data point.
Karen Martin:
Yeah. And also not overreacting, to the point in your book, to one or two data points that are simply variation in the system and being more aware of that variation that exists within a process that's acceptable versus unacceptable.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. Or it could be framed as routine variation versus extraordinary variation. We can do things in the context of Lean to boost the average performance of a system, and we can also take actions that reduce variation. That's not the exclusive domain of Six Sigma.
Conclusion
Mark Graban:
Well, yeah. And that passion comes through in your work and your writing. I really appreciate you taking the time to not only talk about concepts from your book, but I appreciate it was your suggestion that we could try to weave together some of the themes between your book and mine. So thank you for suggesting that.
Karen Martin:
Thank you. Because they do have a lot of common themes in them. And I think maybe we're going to get into this less fearful place where people will feel comfortable being more clear about performance. And it is a measure of success, after all.
Mark Graban:
Before we wrap up here, how can people buy your book? Where can they learn more and find you online?
Karen Martin:
Thank you. Yes. So clarityfirstbook.com will lead them to the book page on our website. And then there's also a quiz that people can take to learn about their own individual comfort with clarity and also the organization's experience with clarity. And that's clarityfirstquiz.com. That's a fun little quiz to get a baseline and look at where you want to close some of those gaps.
Mark Graban:
All right, well, and those are good URLs with clarity.
Karen Martin:
Thank you.
Mark Graban:
Well, again, our guest today has been Karen Martin. Her most recent book again is titled Clarity First.2 It's fun making those connections and it's fun talking to you about the books, Karen.
Karen Martin:
Yeah. Thank you so much, Mark, and have a good rest of the day.
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