The Clarity Walk™

From fog
to clarity.

A documented organizational process.

Burnout has been treated as a personal failing for more than four decades. The contemporary literature names it differently. It is the predictable signal of organizations operating in fog. The Clarity Walk is the diagnostic vocabulary for naming that fog and the structural responses that move organizations through it.

The Premise

Burnout is the result of systems in place that are not meant to help people.

The dominant story has been individual. Teams are tired because they are doing too much. Leaders are tired because they are carrying too much. Black women, women of color, and other systemically pressured people are tired because of the cumulative weight they hold.

All of these descriptions are true. None of them is the cause. The cause is structural ambiguity, named in the contemporary literature with increasing precision and connected to documented outcomes the existing change-management frameworks have not addressed.

Edmondson, 2018 · Frazier et al., 2017

Psychological safety is structural.

Decades of empirical work have established psychological safety as a measurable property of teams that predicts learning behavior, voice, and performance. The contemporary literature locates the source not in personality but in the conditions leaders create.

Babcock et al., 2017 · Babcock et al., 2022

Workload distribution is gendered by default.

The economics literature documents that low-promotability work is asked of and accepted by women at substantially higher rates than men. Boundary ambiguity is the operational mechanism by which the gap is reproduced.

Cortina, 2008 · Tomaskovic-Devey & McCann, 2021

Workplace harm is patterned, not random.

Selective incivility and its contemporary cousins land disproportionately on Black women and women of color, often beneath the threshold of formal complaint. Naming the pattern is the precondition for addressing it.

Three threads in the literature have been running parallel for years. They cross at the same place. The Clarity Walk names that crossing point and gives it operational language.
The Three Fogs

Three structural conditions produce burnout, disengagement, and disproportionate cost.

Each fog has an operational definition, a set of observable manifestations, a peer-reviewed evidence base, and a documented equity dimension. Click each fog to read its full profile.

Operational Definition

Direction Fog is the structural condition in which an organization’s top priorities are not named consistently, not resourced consistently, or not answered the same way at different levels. It is not the absence of priorities. It is the presence of too many, none of them carrying through to execution.

Observable Manifestations

  • Priorities shift without explicit announcement, often surfacing in passing conversation.
  • Workers align to direction Monday and discover it has changed by Wednesday.
  • Performance evaluations reference goals different from the ones operationalized day to day.
  • The same priority is described differently by senior leaders, middle managers, and frontline staff.

Peer-Reviewed Evidence

0% of teammates must guess their priorities at work, and 25% report that not knowing their priorities is the leading driver of productivity loss.1
0% of executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy can list their company’s strategic priorities.2
0% of teammates cited team misalignment as a project workflow challenge in 2024, up from 37% the prior year.3
0% of frontline employees clearly understand the goals that have been passed down to them from leadership.4

Equity Dimension

People without informal access to leadership absorb the cost of Direction Fog first. People of color, women, and contract or visa-dependent staff are less likely to learn about shifting priorities through the side conversations where direction often actually changes. The contemporary turnover literature documents that the resulting churn falls disproportionately on Black women.5

Operational Definition

Decision Fog is the structural condition in which decision authority is implicit rather than explicit. Workers do not know who decides, when input is wanted versus performed, or how a decision will travel from conversation to commitment. The result is decisions that are slow, weak, never made, or made and quietly reversed.

Observable Manifestations

  • Meetings about meetings, alignment calls before the real call.
  • Input is solicited from people whose dissent will not be honored.
  • Decisions made in one room are renegotiated in the next.
  • The cost of pushing back exceeds the cost of going along, and people learn this without it being said.

Peer-Reviewed Evidence

The contemporary literature documents four failure modes of organizational meetings: no decision, poor decision, slow decision, low-commitment decision.6 The substrate is psychological safety, which a 2025 longitudinal study now identifies as eroding even where it had previously been measured.7

0% of the time, one tracked organization was postponing decisions rather than making them.8
0 hrs is the typical time senior executives spend per month working together as a team on strategic issues.8
0% of healthcare executives report that integrating equity into strategic, financial, and operational processes is challenging.9
0% of health equity leaders report being highly involved in organization-wide strategy.9

Equity Dimension

Decisional ambiguity carries differential cost for teammates in marginalized identity groups. The contemporary evidence shows that voice suppression operates most strongly where it is most needed, and that disparate cost compounds across decisions made implicitly rather than explicitly.10

Operational Definition

Boundary Fog is the structural condition in which scope and role are not held by the organization. Workloads expand. Side projects become permanent. Office housework, cultural labor, and emotional support work fall to the same people again and again. The cost of saying no is not redistributed.

Observable Manifestations

  • Project scope grows after launch without renegotiated capacity.
  • Roles drift over time without formal acknowledgment.
  • Non-promotable work is asked of and accepted by the same people repeatedly.
  • Saying no carries professional cost for some teammates and not others.

Peer-Reviewed Evidence

0% of projects experience scope creep, up from 43% a decade earlier.11
0 hrs per year of additional non-promotable work absorbed by women relative to men in documented organizational settings.12
0% of teammates cite having too many projects on their plate as the leading driver of productivity loss.1
0% turnover gap documented between Black women and White women in workplaces with informal social structures favoring the latter.5

Equity Dimension

Boundary Fog falls heaviest on Black women, women of color, visa-dependent staff, and contract teammates. The 2017 American Economic Review paper that anchored the contemporary literature documented the gendered distribution of low-promotability tasks. The 2025 evidence base now adds racial and contractual dimensions to the same pattern.1314

The Three Clarities

For each fog, there’s a structural response.

The Clarity Walk maps each fog to its structural counterpart. The framework’s contribution is diagnostic. The operational implementation lives in the courses, the cohort, and active engagements.

Direction Fog

Unclear priorities

Top priorities are not named, resourced, or answered consistently across levels.

Priority Clarity

Named, resourced, consistent

Top priorities are surfaced in operational language, resourced accordingly, and answered the same way at every level of the organization.

Decision Fog

Unclear authority

Decision rights are implicit. Input is asked for and not honored. Decisions get reversed quietly.

Decision Clarity

Authority is explicit

Decision rights are named in advance. Input is distinguished from authority. The gap between formal process and actual practice is closed.

Boundary Fog

Unclear scope and role

Workloads expand. Non-promotable work falls to the same teammates. The cost of saying no is not redistributed.

Boundary Clarity

Scope is held by the organization

Scope and role are explicit. The cost of saying no is redistributed structurally. Low-promotability work is de-feminized and de-racialized through redistribution mechanisms.

The diagnostic-to-response mapping is the framework. The phases, scripts, and worked organizational examples that translate it into practice are the work of the courses and active engagements.

A cross-cutting mechanism

Performative collaboration is what prevents fogs from becoming clarities.

The construct, defined.

Performative collaboration substitutes the appearance of clarity for the work of clarity. It looks like alignment. It sounds like equity. It produces fog.

The construct is named here as the framework’s original contribution. It is distinct from adjacent terms in the literature and explains why organizations with progressive stated values reproduce the same patterns the language was supposed to interrupt.

Distinguished from performative allyship

Performative allyship15 describes individual posturing on identity issues. Performative collaboration describes a structural pattern in which meetings, surveys, and alignment exercises take up the time and energy that real decision-making would require, leaving the underlying ambiguity in place.

Distinguished from selective incivility

Selective incivility16 is a research term for low-grade workplace rudeness that lands disproportionately on women of color (eye rolls, interruptions, exclusion from meetings, dismissive tone). Performative collaboration is broader. It describes a process that can produce selective incivility as one of several outputs while remaining structurally intact.

In conversation with the canon

The Clarity Walk extends, rather than displaces, existing change-management thinking.

Each of the dominant change-management frameworks names something true. Each has been critiqued for what it does not name. The Clarity Walk operationalizes the diagnostic step that the existing models leave to interpretation.

Model What it names What the literature notes it misses How the Clarity Walk extends it
KotterChange leadership steps The sequence of steps required to lead a planned change effort, anchored in urgency and coalition. Critiqued for treating change as a linear executive-led project and underweighting the diagnostic step.17 Adds operational diagnostic vocabulary upstream of any change effort, and supports non-linear application: organizations can re-enter the diagnostic at any point as conditions shift, rather than progressing in a fixed sequence.
LewinUnfreeze / Change / Refreeze The phases by which an organizational state shifts and stabilizes. Critiqued for misattribution and for assuming organizations sit in stable states rather than continuous flux.18 Reframes “unfreezing” as the act of naming which fog is operative, which makes the model usable for organizations that never enter a stable state.
EdmondsonPsychological safety The condition under which teammates feel safe to speak, dissent, and admit error. Defines the substrate but does not specify the structural conditions that produce or erode it.7 Names Decision Fog as the structural condition that erodes psychological safety, and Decision Clarity as the response.
SengeLearning organization The disciplines required for an organization to learn from itself over time. Critiqued for offering an aspirational state without the mid-term diagnostic that distinguishes it from organizations that simply describe themselves as learning.19 Provides the diagnostic vocabulary that distinguishes performative collaboration from genuine organizational learning.
HeifetzAdaptive leadership The distinction between technical and adaptive challenges, and the leadership posture each requires. Names the posture but does not specify which observable conditions signal which kind of challenge. The Three Fogs are observable signals. They allow the technical-versus-adaptive distinction to be made operationally rather than retrospectively.
Existing frameworks name change as a process or describe leadership as a posture. None of them operationalizes the diagnostic step that distinguishes ambiguous fog conditions from clear ones. The Clarity Walk fills that gap and connects each fog to documented contemporary outcomes.
Research Foundation

The framework is anchored in a documented evidence base.

The contemporary literature spans organizational behavior, behavioral economics, occupational health, public health, and equity research. The full systematic review is documented in the companion white paper.

  • Inclusion window2021–2026
  • MethodologyPRISMA-aligned
  • Peer-reviewed sources44
White paper

From Fog to Clarity: A Systematic Review

The full systematic review documents the evidence base for the Three Fogs, names performative collaboration as the cross-cutting mechanism, and positions the framework against existing change-management models.

Read the White Paper

Page References

  1. Slingshot. (2023). 2023 digital work trends report.
  2. MIT Sloan Management Review. (n.d.). Strategic priority identification among executives.
  3. Lucid. (2024). 2024 workplace study.
  4. Action Strategies. (n.d.). Team alignment survey research.
  5. Linos, E., Mobasseri, S., & Roussille, N. (2024). Asymmetric peer effects at work: The effect of white coworkers on Black women’s careers. Management Science.
  6. McKinsey & Company. (n.d.). To unlock better decision making, plan better meetings.
  7. Bransby, D. P., Kerrissey, M., & Edmondson, A. C. (2025). Psychological safety erosion in contemporary organizations.
  8. Bain & Company. (n.d.). Decision insights series.
  9. Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. (2025). Health equity remains a business imperative.
  10. Gloor, J. L., et al. (2024). Decisional ambiguity and disparate cost across identity groups. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 184.
  11. Project Management Institute. (n.d.). Pulse of the profession.
  12. Babcock, L., Peyser, B., Vesterlund, L., & Weingart, L. (2022). The no club: Putting a stop to women’s dead-end work. Simon & Schuster.
  13. Babcock, L., Recalde, M. P., Vesterlund, L., & Weingart, L. (2017). Gender differences in accepting and receiving requests for tasks with low promotability. American Economic Review, 107(3).
  14. Leafyard. (2025). EAP survey on workload distribution.
  15. Performative allyship literature. (2020–2024). Multiple sources.
  16. Cortina, L. M. (2008). Unseen injustice: Incivility as modern discrimination in organizations. Academy of Management Review.
  17. Appelbaum, S. H., Habashy, S., Malo, J. L., & Shafiq, H. (2012). Back to the future: Revisiting Kotter’s 1996 change model. Journal of Management Development.
  18. Cummings, S., Bridgman, T., & Brown, K. G. (2016). Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management. Human Relations.
  19. Caldwell, R. (2012). Systems thinking, organizational change and agency: A practice theory critique of Senge’s learning organization. Journal of Change Management.

Two paths through the fog.

The Clarity Walk is a diagnostic. From here, the work is recognizing which fog is operative and choosing the right structural response.

Diagnose

Take the Fog Assessment

A three-minute structured diagnostic that names which fog is currently operative in your team or organization. Email-gated, equity-anchored.

Start the Assessment
Apply the framework

Explore the Courses

Two courses translate the framework into practice. Navigate is built for individual contributors and team leads working under organizational fog. Lead is built for executives and senior leaders who want to close the gap between intent and impact.

See the Courses