Clarity and alignment are the yin and yang of next steps.
Clarity is soft. We human beings often find it through going inwards. We can’t see it, but we know when we have found it, when it lands in us. We feel it in our belly, our chest, in the atmosphere. When a group finds shared clarity, we can see people’s bodies responding: they smile, relax their shoulders, lean towards each other, or relax into their seat. We can’t force clarity; simply create the right conditions to let clarity arrive. And when it does, it's often only about the right next steps.
Once clarity lands, we can shift into creating alignment.
Alignment is as straight and pointed as an arrow. It's strong, directive, and energising. While clarity can involve messy (our projects and our communities might benefit from messy), there’s no messy in creating alignment. Creating alignment moves our attention outwards into noticing and responding to the effects of our decisions and actions, feedback loops and real-time information, and how structures and systems affect us as individuals and groups. It shifts us from the softness of enquiry into sharpness and focus.
Strategies need both.
The yin and the yang.
Once we can create the right conditions for both, we can build organisations, communities, cultures, and teams that are autonomous, creative, joyful, intuitive, and flexible.
And we can design strategies and communication that evolve and adapt over time.