Beyond Buzzwords: Making Clarity a Tangible Asset | Ann Latham

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How to Use Clarity as a Tool for Strategic Planning and Process Improvement

Ann Latham reveals how clarity can transform productivity, team alignment, and decision-making in organizations. Through her insights and techniques, Ann shares the process of making clarity a practical tool for business success.

How do you cut through the noise to get to what truly matters?

In this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, host Bill Sherman dives into this question with Ann Latham, the mind behind The Power of Clarity and The Disconnect Principle. Ann’s journey to clarity began when she asked former bosses and colleagues a surprising question: What do I do best? The answer was clear—she had an uncanny ability to sift through information, distill its essence, and align teams with actionable plans. So began her consulting journey and the creation of Uncommon Clarity.

Ann quickly realized that “clarity” could be a hard sell—it’s an abstract concept people often overlook. To bridge this gap, she started showing how clarity impacts concrete outcomes: higher productivity, greater confidence, fewer mistakes, and optimized potential. Through strategic planning, process improvement, and team alignment, she began weaving clarity into the DNA of organizations. As her consulting grew, so did her focus on teaching others to achieve clarity themselves. She moved beyond providing solutions, empowering her clients to own the process. Now, as a writer and speaker, Ann is on a mission to make clarity a universal skill, publishing books and giving TED Talks to illuminate this essential but elusive concept. Her insights aren’t just techniques; they’re catalysts for meaningful change in any organization.

Three Key Takeaways

Clarity Drives Results: Ann emphasizes that clarity isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a strategic asset that boosts productivity, confidence, and team effectiveness

Clarity as a Teachable Skill: Beyond solving problems for clients, Ann has developed ways to teach organizations how to cultivate clarity themselves, making it a sustainable part of their culture.

Practical Clarity Spectrum: To tackle the vagueness around clarity, Ann developed a spectrum that defines specific elements needed to reach clear, actionable outcomes, making it easier for teams to get aligned and achieve their goals.

Peter Winick, the CEO and Founder of Thought Leadership Leverage, like Ann, often helps his clients find clarity in their work. Check out this article by Peter on Clarity for Priorities.

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Transcript

Bill Sherman The practice of thought leadership requires clarity. As a practicing thought leader, you need to be exceptionally clear around your core insights, your target audiences and the impact your ideas can create and be able to articulate all of those things. Let’s take a step back. What is clarity and how do we achieve greater clarity in the practice of thought leadership? My guest today and late has spent a large part of her career exploring the concept of clarity and bringing her insights to others and has practiced thought leadership as a consultant, author of articles and books. Such is the power of clarity and as a speaker and podcast guest. Today I sit down with an to talk about the connection of clarity with thought leadership. We also explore her journey of thought leadership. I’m Bill Sherman and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready. Let’s begin. Welcome to the show. Ann.

Ann Latham Thank you. Great to be here.

Bill Sherman So you have built thoughtful leadership around clarity. And my question for you is, how did you come to land on clarity as the area that you were focusing?

Ann Latham That’s a great question. So before I quit my corporate job to start my independent consulting business, I. Reading books about how to be a consultant, but I knew that my value proposition was critical. So I sent an email out to all to my boss, my previous bosses, my colleagues, coworkers, just anyone I could think of and said, What is it I do especially well that is most unusual. And I got these wonderful, thoughtful responses that would talk about how I take in large quantities of information and cut to the chase and find the kernel, find the essence, get everyone on the same page and move them forward with concrete decisions and concrete ideas and plans. And so after reading all these different emails, I said, I create clarity. So it looks pretty clear.

Bill Sherman So was clarity a word that kept popping up in those responses, or was it one that you sort of had to infer and distill down from responses?

Ann Latham It was both. They used the word and it was pretty clear the way they were talking about things that that’s what I do. Of course, then I searched for a new URL that made sense and I had came up with uncommon clarity because they said, I am uncommonly good at this. So uncommonly clever uncommon clarity was available and that my website.

Bill Sherman And that’s a great start to clarity because it answers the question not only what are you good at, but also how do you make it memorable for others? You’ve got a great sort of hook into the name of the platform. Uncommon clarity rather than common clutter. Right? So my question really lies then. You said you had this. I’m good at clarity. You got to take the next step up. How am I? Good at clarity. How does this happen? Right. And so how did you decode clarity?

Ann Latham That’s another great question. So I. Said, I create clarity. That was what my value proposition was all about. And what I discovered is. That. That’s. Not something people want to buy. It’s too vague. It’s still unclear. They don’t know what the value of that is. They don’t know what the purpose of that is. Everyone thinks clarity is a great thing, like mom and apple pie, but it’s not. There’s no urgency there. So while I was looking at, you know, how I create clarity and I started writing about how to create clarity and how I do it right away, I did strategic planning, I did team effectiveness. You know, I did process improvements. I help people with all kinds of things. But clarity improves productivity. It improves confidence in eliminates mistakes. It makes everyone be able to maximize their potential. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. So I could weave that into pretty much every aspect of how you run your business.

Bill Sherman And it leads to a question of what is clarity? Is it a skill or set of skills? Is it a mindset? Is it a process? Is this a system, you know, that leads to, you know, it’s a word we use often? Hey, I need more clarity here. But it’s not like there’s a barcode at the store, you know, where you can put it on the checkout counter and go, Hey, I picked up, you know, three units of clarity. So what is clarity, mindset, skill, talent? You know, are some people born with it? And that’s just locker.

Ann Latham Clarity is a word that’s incredibly unclear, which is really sad. And when you think about it. We have more shared vocabulary to talk about the temperature of soup than the degree of clarity, because soup can be scalding hot. It can be very hot, nice and hot. It can get down to, you know, warm, lukewarm, cold, frozen. You know, there’s so many we know what those are and we know what order they come in. But when we talk about clarity, we talk about things being a little unclear, a little confusing, not very clear. We need a little more clarity. It’s just like there’s this nebulous point in the sky and we’re always just a tiny smidgen off that point, right? We’re never grossly unclear who are just a smidgen off. So we don’t really have any words to really agree on. How unclear are we? So I create a spectrum from this clarity, which is the complete lack of clarity because I got tired of typing, lack of clarity. So from this clarity on one end to uncommon clarity on the other end, and I chose the uncommon because most people think they are clearer than they really are. But I don’t think very many people would say they are uncommonly clear. So now we have a spectrum and we can talk to you.

Bill Sherman Created a scale basically, right? Yeah. So the equivalent of a thermometer readings of exact. Can we discuss and agree if I think I’m at one level of clarity and you think you’re at another level of clarity, then we’ve got to sit down and have a clarity conversation.

Ann Latham Right, Right. And we don’t even have to agree on exactly where because what happens is and I, I wrote the book The Power of Clarity. The first chapter is we’re not as clear as we think we are. And there’s a ton of examples about why we aren’t. And, you know, I said that people always think they’re just a smidgen off being clear. And when you look at those examples and you go, where are they on the spectrum, guess what we don’t hear on the dis clarity end over and over and over again. So that’s closer to our natural state. But you see what clarity is. So to the other end of the spectrum, this uncommon clarity. This is knowing exactly what you’re trying to accomplish. What it looks like when you’re done, how well it has to be done, how you’re going to get there, with whom you’re going to get there, what resources you need so you can charge ahead to whatever goal you’re trying to accomplish. So clarity set absolute sense of I’m doing this and I know exactly how I’m getting there. Is it a skill? Yes, it’s a skill. Is it something you’re born with? I think there is some of that because I think that I was a math major. People told me I created clarity. I never was taught how to create clarity. But I come by some of that naturally, I believe. But my book is all about how you can create that kind of clarity to improve productivity and confidence in your ability to empower others.

Bill Sherman What I love about the journey you just described is you. You just. The process of clarity on clarity itself. Right. And said, okay, this is nebulous. This is sort of like that fog halo around the moon and we’re describing the halo rather than the moon itself. Let’s get specific and describe what the it is. Let’s create an operational definition. Let’s also then create a scale. So you put in work to reduce ambiguity around clarity before taking that as thought leadership out to others.

Ann Latham Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Bill Sherman So there’s a step between, Hey, my friends and colleagues said that I’m really good at clarity. And then building sort of the tools of clarity, but then saying, I’m going to write a book or multiple books on clarity and I’m really going to plant my flag as this is my leadership. Because your friends and colleagues who said, Hey, you’re really good at creating clarity. After you go and consult, Right? What lead led you down the thought leadership road for this?

Ann Latham Well, once I decided, okay, clarity is my thing and I believed it, I really believed it. And believe me, if you are your value proposition, life is a lot easier than if you’re trying to fake it till you make it. But that still doesn’t mean you can sell it, because I already said you can’t really sell clarity because all by itself.

Bill Sherman The buyer and nobody says, Hey, I’ve got a clarity problem, right? In the same way as, you know, I need an accountant. I need a clarity expert. People don’t think that way.

Ann Latham Right. And even when I would introduce myself as I’m a Latham, my company is called Uncommon Clarity, and they all go, Well, we could use some of that, but that’s the end of the conversation, you know. So I started writing about clarity right away because I knew as a new consultant, you have to get out there, you have to speak, you have to network, you have to write, you have to do things to get your ideas out there and to be found. And I hated networking. That’s just was it. I think all was really painful. I was happy to do public speaking. That was that was great. But I started writing right away and getting published every place I could. And I was always writing about where things were unclear and how you could create greater clarity. And the more I did that, the more I learned about how I do it and how I could do it better because I was focused on that. That was my brand. That was that was my value. That’s what drives me. And I’ve always been driven by being more productive, more efficient. I mean, look, my biggest concern when I started doing public speaking was that I would two things tell people something they already knew and waste their time or tell something to people that they didn’t need to know and waste their time and be. So I was so efficiency driven that, you know, figuring out how to do things more effectively. How do you create that vital clarity was what I was all about.

Bill Sherman Well. And as you said, you came from a background math major process improvement and really systems thinking and some. That’s right. And what I like about what you just said is you had a deep focus on how do I create value for people. Right. Because especially when it’s not connected to an obvious budget item, very few organizations have a clarity budget for 2020, for 2025 and say, Hey, we need to buy X units of clarity. So. How do you then go from writing to really understanding the needs of your audience and making sure they understand the climate? How do you create value for your audience?

Ann Latham Well, initially I was doing things that they recognize strategic planning, for instance. But when I did strategic planning with a group of people. I’m creating clarity for them. I’m helping them figure out where they are and what their options might be and what they hope they could achieve. And I’m helping them sort that all out, and I’m creating clarity every inch of the way now. My, my, my clients, usually they were like, stunned because I would create so much agreement that they didn’t think was possible. There was one time when I was involved in a project where there were three different organizations involved and they were just butting heads. I mean, they were screaming at each other and I got them all on the same page and I quickly got them to figure out where they are and what some of our options might be. And just by doing that with specificity and process, clarity and got them all to a unanimous agreement and they thought this is how did you do that? We didn’t even, you know, do team building or anything. And we’re all agreeing what’s happened here. And so. Yeah. So I would do that. And then some of my clients that I had more multiple times started to be interested in what is my process, how do you do that? And so that’s when I was finally able to start selling the creation of clarity, those skills and teaching people how to do some of the things that I did. But that was a handful of my clients. Most of them were still warden team improvement, process improvement, strategic planning, you know, the standard old things.

Bill Sherman And there’s a difference between being in the room and being good at it and facilitating clarity or facilitating your expertise and then being able to teach that to others. Huge difference. Yeah. How did you make that leap? Right. And how do you transfer that skill? Because often thoughtful leadership is, you know, so deep in your own head that you do it instinctively in the room or the zoom. Harry, How did you get that to scale, to be able to teach it at?

Ann Latham That’s a really I don’t know. I know that I always talk about how some people are naturally clearer than others, and a lot of times it’s those CEOs and the high ups in the organization who have some natural clarity because that’s kind of how they get to where they are, because they’re there quicker to make decisions and things like that. But they don’t see that this clarity around them and they don’t have the ability to teach what they do. So it’s exactly what you’re talking about. You know, it’s like they want people to just understand them and to be clear and to get things done. And they don’t see that this clarity and I coined the term clarity blind because I think most people are blind to the lack of clarity around them. And so there’s a lot of people even who are naturally clear, who can’t see what the other people are missing. And I. I think I just naturally turned out to be a really good facilitator. And the more I did, the better I got. But I can I can tell you about one time when I was a brand new employee at a high tech company. Long before I started my business. And I’m sitting in a meeting and I’m listening to two bunch of people talking. But there was one particular issue that two people were going back and forth on back and forth, back and forth, and they’re talking in acronyms. I was brand new. I had no idea what they’re talking about. But I listened and I listened and listened. And then when they stopped and they go, okay. And I go, wait a minute, did you just agree to do blah, blah, blah with X, Y, Z? And one guy says yes, and the other guy says no. So not understanding at all what they were talking about, but listening carefully, I could tell that they thought they agreed, but they didn’t. They didn’t. And if I hadn’t said anything, you know, they would have run off and done totally opposite things, trying to solve a problem in two different ways. So something about what I could do was that natural ability to create clarity, to hear the differences, hear the discrepancies and see that people are not really on the same page when they think they are.

Bill Sherman If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a five-star review at ratethispodcast.com/ltl and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts. So you’ve written two books. You’ve consulted. You’ve taught the skill to others. Where has clarity taken you and where are you going next?

Ann Latham Okay. So. Okay. So I wrote The Power of Clarity, which I believe is the modern classic, and people have called it that. That really is sort of the definitive book on clarity. I since then wrote the Disconnect Principle, which is about how to communicate, how to take the difficulty out of difficult conversations. And it was a topic that I couldn’t quite squeeze into the power of clarity. So it became a second book. Prior to that, I wrote the Clarity papers, which is more tactical and less big picture than the power of clarity. And I also before that wrote a book called Uncommon Meetings, which is a short book about how to create clarity in meetings. So they are much more productive. So with those four books out there, the next thing I did is we did a Ted Talk and that was another whole experience in itself. But when you do Ted talks, they tell you it cannot be self-promotional.

Bill Sherman Right?

Ann Latham And I wanted to tell the story about my client, Max, in the Ted Talk and how working with Max led to this epiphany that led to the Disconnect principle. But I couldn’t call him a client. Or that might be considered self-promotional. Beginning of the Ted talk, I announce that I’m a retired management consultant. There’s no question about whether it’s self-promotional. And I hadn’t told the world this at this point, but it’s out there on Ted and I have I have taken console clients. I mean, I’m not consulting any more. I’m just writing. And I’m mostly I’m interested in spreading the ideas that are in my books because I think they’re important ideas. So I am still out there writing more and continuing to promote those.

Bill Sherman So how long have you been on the journey of clarity around clarity? So. Decades, sir.

Ann Latham Well, it was 20 years ago. I quit my job and my business. And so for 20 years, I doggedly pursued creating clarity for the world, trying to make it a better place, making organizations run more effectively. And it was a grand it was a grand tour.

Bill Sherman And my question on that is, how did you keep the spark around clarity alive and how do you keep it alive after 20 years?

Ann Latham No. Well, because I still see the evidence of the disk clarity around me, you know, And every time I talk to people and. Former clients and the so I’ve never mind politics. You look at the lack of clarity and if you can see it, if you’re not clarity blind, it is stunning and you see the opportunities. I see opportunities all the time where people could get along better, where people could see eye to eye, where people could move things forward, where things could be more effective, more productive, more profitable. And so as long as I keep seeing that in the world hasn’t caught on, I want to share that that information, those tips and those ideas.

Bill Sherman That’s fantastic. And you mentioned earlier the difference between fake it till you make it and having something that deeply aligns with who you are and your passion. And I can hear that in your voice where the world needs more clarity and you are out to help evangelize for it. Yes.

Ann Latham So that doesn’t mean I didn’t have to fake it a couple of times to make it to the network. And I hated it.

Bill Sherman And there are parts of failed leadership that everybody struggles with. You know, someone may say, I hate writing war. I hate being on stage war. Like you said, the networking. It’s you have to find the way of balancing those pieces so that you can make it work for you. Right. And sometimes it’s like getting your vegetables where you look and you go, I don’t like this part, but I know what’s necessary.

Ann Latham Right? When you run a business like a consulting business. But thought leadership is one part of it. There’s the consulting with your clients is another, but then there’s sales and marketing and the networking and all the other things you do. And luckily writing was a good part of that marketing, and it’s something that I do well and I like to do. So that’s nice. But there were plenty of aspects of selling and marketing that I hated.

Bill Sherman So on your journey of thought leadership, you. I have a question for you. What have been the moment of greatest joy for you in the pursuit of clarity? Right.

Ann Latham I think. I mean, it was a pleasure to publish my first commercially published book. I think my greatest joy, though, has to come back to the clients who truly have embraced what I’ve taught them. And I’ve changed organizations dramatically and they speak a new language now. They because they look at the power of clarity. There’s a whole appendix in there of new words to help you talk about clarity, because we don’t have that vocabulary. So when I connect with clients and walk into their sites and I hear them talking about we have a disconnect or, you know, let’s use let’s you sort of solve this decision, you know, and I hear my words coming out of their mouths. There is nothing better than that because you know that they heard it. They understood what I’m saying. They get it and they’ve experienced success with it. So it’s perpetuating itself in those organizations. And that’s better than anything.

Bill Sherman That’s a great example, right. And I’ve heard other people who have gotten a word or an idea out into the general business lexicon. Where the idea gets out there and it’s not even attributed to them anymore. And some people find joy in that where it is just a word that people use, and they understand it. And some say, but it was me. I had that idea. Right. And ideas sometimes just take off and go viral. And there are times where the ideas and even attribute it anymore that that’s got to be a great feeling when you hear people using your language and you’re like, I remember sitting down and coming up with that language or using that term for the first time.

Ann Latham Yeah. Yeah. It’s very satisfying. Like one of my most. Popular inventions is the phrase treadmill verbs, which are the words that are mostly found on most meeting agendas. And I call them treadmill verbs, because you can do them forever. There’s no way to know when you’re done.

Bill Sherman For example?

Ann Latham Report, review, share, communicate.

Bill Sherman Revisit.

Ann Latham Update, yeah, all those words. You can ask someone to review or report something. They can do it forever. So they just talk and they fill workspace and they take up time and you don’t necessarily get anything out of it. So everyone should eliminate those and choose destination verbs instead. Luckily, there’s very few of them that add up to honest to God progress. Words like decide.

Bill Sherman Choose. Yeah.

Ann Latham List. Approve.

Bill Sherman And that alone, the difference between treadmill verbs and then, what was the other term…

Ann Latham Destination verbs.

Bill Sherman Destination. Gives a distinction that is easy and memorable. And that’s the hard thing. Often in thought leadership is distilling complex patterns down into something that you can remember on a Tuesday in a meeting and go, shit, this agenda is filled with treadmill verbs. We got a problem.

Ann Latham Yup. And that can change everything. An organization. If that’s all they learn from the power of clarity, it’s for one little skill to figure out how to eliminate those treadmill verbs and use destination verbs instead. And so, yeah, it’s very satisfying.

Bill Sherman So my last question for you and is one around the journey itself. You’ve practiced thought leadership now for 20 years. He started with reaching out to colleagues and saying, hey, what am I. Am I uncommonly good at. What advice would you give to your younger self? The one who is reaching out to colleagues and friends based on the journey that you have gone through and thought leadership.

Ann Latham Boy. Like I think of what? Well, let me just pick one.

Bill Sherman Please.

Ann Latham So I was constantly trying to attract clients, obviously, because I wanted to attract revenue and be able to work with real people. Although working with real people gives you ideas to fuel the thought leadership. But if I had realized years ago how important my thought leadership would be to me and I believe to others, I would have cultivated. Networked with more people in academia because I believe that at least two of my books should be taught in business schools. And then if I had worked that angle earlier, more people would be familiar with the power of clarity and the disconnect principle. And they would be using my language, and they would be benefiting from it. But instead, I was focused more on corporate clients. And they’re not very good at spreading stuff.

Bill Sherman And I think that’s a really good point, is you can bake language into a single organization or culture. If you get a senior leader who says, we need to make this how we do this here. Yeah, but it doesn’t hop between organizations as easily as if you embedded in a B school curricula.

Ann Latham Right. Yeah. And they’re not going to want it to hop because if they find it super valuable, they don’t want to pass it on to any company.

Bill Sherman Exactly. Exactly. It’s this is our competitive advantage. We have greater clarity. Why would we let other people know about how to create clarity?

Ann Latham Exactly. Yeah.

Bill Sherman So and I want to thank you for joining us today for a conversation around clarity. Your journey and thought leadership and even a meta conversation of what clarity is and how to bring it declared.

Ann Latham Thank you very much, Bill. These have been good questions and it’s been a lot of fun coming up with the answers.

Bill Sherman Okay. You’ve made it to the end of the episode, and that means you’re probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are three recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game and thought leadership as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you’re looking for strategy, or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I’d love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.