Clarify & Cure Root Causes of Obfuscation

“What we have here is a failure to communicate.” (major understatement by the oppressive prison warden in "Cool Hand Luke")

Clarifying and overcoming root causes of obfuscation will increase cash flow and corporate value.

Poor communication is wasteful and counterproductive. To not be dealing with reality is a killer of time and resources. Total truth is more than just random facts of differing value; it requires the added clarity of insightful priorities.

"Talk" about how to improve company efficiency, productivity, or effectiveness, much less profitability, cash flow, and corporate value, must take into account the reality of the human communication factor within the company. And not just from management to employees, but from employees to management and the multitude of timely and truthful messages needed from any one person to another that can improve business value.

The human communication factor in the world of improvement can be either negative (obfuscation - fuzziness, muddiness, avoidance) or positive (clarification - truthfulness, completeness, priority valued). Obfuscation is more than conventional lies, denials, & deception. To obfuscate is to disguise, conceal, confuse or complicate, even by avoidance (passive resistance). The antonym is to clarify.

What exactly is confused, disguised, concealed, or complicated by obfuscation? We can call it the truth or reality. Synonyms for truth include fact, reality, certainty, accuracy, genuineness, exactness, legitimacy, veracity, honesty, candor, integrity, etc. Antonyms include fiction, falsehood, error, dishonesty.

Obfuscation may be due to any mix of: (1) seeking potential gain from promoting error, (2) fear of the consequences of communicating the truth, and (3) apathy, ineptness, mental impairment, and accident.

The more sensational category of seeking gain through fraud, demagoguery, and other forms of abuse gets the most press, and is the cause of highly costly attempts at regulation. The other categories are more hidden, but probably even more common and costly. Overall, the concealment of truth, deliberate or unintentional is a major barrier to improvement which can be reduced by improved leadership, management style, and resultant company culture and organizational design and development.

Truth is knowledge of things as they really are, as they really were, and as they really are to come. Knowledge that is filtered by fear, covered up, denied, or misrepresented for any reason is obviously less visible. Visibility is the first and most important level of clarity.

Improvement requires clarity about base line conditions. The truth must be clearly described and accurately revealed by those who know so that all affected can make needed improvements. Truth is more than appearances. Symptoms are appearances. Truth that matters most to improvement has to do with root causes, which are identified through increasingly deeper levels of clarity.

Common thread root cause clarification has immense potential to increase cash flow, corporate value, and everything else good in and about the company.

Because the barriers of fear, apathy, cynicism, ineptness, mental impairment, and accident are massively costly, clarifying and overcoming their root causes is enormously profitable.