In every organization, the clearest strategy often breaks down at the managerial layer. This happens because leaders are completely saturated in information; they attended the strategy meeting, read the pre-read, and helped craft the implementation plan. To them, the full context is obvious.
This saturation leads to the fatal assumption: My team already knows the context.
Managers forget that their teams only receive information one layer deep, often filtered through multiple layers of management. The manager delivers the instruction but never provides the strategic necessity behind it.
When the team receives only the what without the why, the organization immediately incurs a cost. If they don't understand the strategic urgency, they assign the task as low priority. This lack of context guarantees rework, forcing managers to intervene and correct errors that shouldn't have happened in the first place. Worse, the team starts to feel like they are just executing orders, not contributing to a larger objective, which immediately fuels disengagement.
The system fails because managers mistake their own deep knowledge for shared understanding.
The solution is a simple, repeatable check to enforce clarity: the Three Whys. Before delivering any instruction, a manager must be able to articulate three answers, and then deliver those answers alongside the task:
- Why is this happening now? (The immediate reason or deadline)
- Why does this matter to the organization? (The strategic outcome)
- Why does this impact your team specifically? (How this task changes their function)
This check forces the manager to step outside their information bubble and ensure the full context is explicitly shared. When you enforce the Three Whys, you stop delivering commands and start delivering usable clarity.
Clarity flows from context, not volume.
