Clarity is cheap. Confusion costs millions.

Clarity is cheap. Confusion costs millions.

Most teams understand technical debt. Few recognize clarity debt.

It starts small. Decisions undocumented. Tradeoffs left implicit. Assumptions left hanging. Then someone leaves, another joins, and suddenly the system behaves like it’s haunted.

Clarity debt compounds. It slows down delivery, erodes trust, and turns every discussion into an archeological dig.

Architecture doesn’t fail because of complexity. It fails because nobody remembers why it was designed that way.

As a leader, your job isn’t to make every decision. It’s to ensure decisions are made. Visible. Explicit. Owned.

Every line of unclear reasoning is a future incident. Every undocumented tradeoff is a future rewrite.

Pay for clarity early. It’s the cheapest reliability layer you’ll ever design.

How do you ensure that decisions remain visible once the meeting ends?