The more we define, the less we understand

A few years ago I saw a change programme team produce a playbook. Not a document — a play "book", a word that should probably have been a warning. A large capable team spent months on it, setting out to define everything the new way of working would involve. And because they were conscientious, each definition uncovered another thing that needed defining, which uncovered another, until the playbook had become a piece of work that could never be finished.

It was, by every measure, thorough. It was also vast. And almost nobody read it. The few who did said — a little apologetically — that they couldn't find the part meant for them. Most of it was clearly written for somebody else. They were impressed with the effort but starving for insights from it.

Months of effort and a serious amount of money had produced a document whose chief accomplishment was its own completeness.

I think about that playbook often. Because the instinct beneath it is one of the most reasonable, most expensive, and most mistaken instincts in organisational life: if we define enough, people will finally understand.

Now hold that against a poppy in a field.

A few summers ago I was walking through the countryside when I noticed a poppy standing alone in a farmer's field. It was unmistakably a poppy — not because I am a botanist, but because I am emphatically not one.

I couldn't give you its Latin name, describe its reproductive structures, or tell you a single thing about its cellular composition. And yet I knew exactly what it was. A red flower, a poppy, standing in the grass. Had a friend asked, these words would have handed it over intact. Simple. Useful. Enough.

The playbook took a thousand definitions and reached almost no one. The photo took no words and reached everyone who saw it. The distance between them is the whole of this essay.

The playbook was not unusual. Organisations define for a living. We define roles and responsibilities. We define governance, processes, decision rights, operating models. Then we define how the definitions relate to one another. Then we draw diagrams to explain the relationships. We love Target Operating Models, RACIs and Decision Making Matrices.

Then we write glossaries to explain the terms and the diagrams, and eventually we run training courses to explain the glossaries. Somewhere in there, understanding quietly leaves the room.

The paradox of definition

Definitions are not the enemy. They are one of the most powerful tools we have. The moment I say "chair", you know roughly what I mean. The moment an organisation defines a customer, a project or a risk, it creates a shared reference point — and shared reference points are how groups of people manage to act as one.

But every definition carries a cost. To define a thing is to draw a boundary around it, and to draw a boundary is to leave something out. A map is useful precisely because it leaves things out. If it included every grain of sand, every leaf, every crack in the pavement, it would stop being a map and quietly become the territory — useless, because it had turned into the very thing it was meant to help you navigate.

That cost is worth paying where precision is the point — a contract, a safety procedure, the handover between two teams who must not misunderstand each other. The trouble begins when we pay it everywhere, on the assumption that understanding rises in step with detail. The more accurately we describe something, the clearer it ought to become. In practice, past a certain point, the opposite happens.

Information is not understanding

The deeper mistake is an assumption about communication itself. Organisations tend to treat communication as the transfer of information. I know something. I write it down. I send it to you. Now you know it too.

But people are not hard drives. There is no shortage of editorial space, but there is a shortage of attention space. We do not store every detail of reality; we make sense of it. We do not absorb information so much as interpret it. And that single distinction changes everything.

A photograph of a poppy communicates almost instantly. The mind recognises the pattern, and meaning appears — no glossary, no process map, no governance model, no fifty-page explanatory annex. The communication works not because it carries more information, but because it creates more understanding. It is why a story can land what a spreadsheet cannot, why a metaphor can outrun a framework, why a single image can succeed where an exhaustive specification only exhausts. Not because the simple forms are less sophisticated, but because they are built for the way human beings actually make sense of the world.

The organisational trap

Watch what an organisation does when something becomes unclear, and the response is almost always the same. Add a process. Add a document. Add a framework. Define another term, mint another acronym, build another model. Update the wiki, republish the manual, create a playbook.

The faith is that understanding will eventually precipitate out of sufficient accumulation — that if we just add enough information, people will finally get it.

Yet the organisations that are losing meaning between idea to value, and slowing down the most, rarely have an information shortage. They have a meaning shortage. Their people are drowning in explanation while starving for clarity. The signal sits buried somewhere beneath the description of the signal. The map has grown larger than the territory.

Each addition, taken on its own, is entirely rational. Collectively they produce something nobody chose: not the complexity of the work, but the complexity of explaining the work and how it moves - which is the more exhausting of the two, and by some distance the less useful.

Knowing is not naming

I suspect organisations quietly confuse knowing with naming. If we can label a thing, file it under a category, and set it inside a framework, we feel as though we understand it. But naming is not understanding. You can memorise every part of a flower and miss its beauty entirely. You can learn every acronym in a company without grasping how a single decision actually gets made. You can know the structure and still not understand the system.

Worse, the more attention we give to naming things, the easier it becomes to forget what those things were for. The language starts to stand in for the reality. The framework becomes the work. The process becomes the purpose. The words close over the thing they were meant to point at.

The courage to leave things out

Perhaps this is why communication is so widely misread. We assume the great communicators are the ones who can explain everything. The truth is closer to the reverse. Great communicators understand what can be left unsaid. They hunt for the simplest representation that still holds the essential truth — not the complete truth, the essential one. They measure success not by how much information they transmit, but by how much understanding they create.

That takes judgement. It takes restraint. And it takes a certain nerve, because simplicity feels exposed in a way complexity never does. Complexity signals expertise. It looks rigorous. It offers the warm reassurance that every possibility has been accounted for. Simplicity offers no such cover. It offers only understanding — and then stands there, with nothing to hide behind.

What clarity actually is

So perhaps clarity is not the removal of complexity at all. The world is complex. Organisations are complex. People are complex. Clarity is not pretending otherwise.

Perhaps clarity is the ability to see what matters despite the complexity. To recognise the flower without reaching for the textbook. To hold the purpose without memorising the process. To catch the pattern without cataloguing every detail.

None of this means abandoning definitions. It means knowing their limits. Definitions are tools, not destinations. The point of communication was never to describe reality with perfect accuracy; it was to build enough shared understanding for people to act together. And that is where so many organisations lose their way. In trying to define everything, they accidentally make everything harder to understand.

The result is a quiet irony. The more information they produce, the less meaning their people can find. The more precisely they describe the flower, the harder it becomes to see the poppy.