THIS MOMENT COUNTS · ISSUE 13

How much are we talking about?

Wednesday, July 15, 2026 · by Dr. Michael Gerharz

There’s a comforting story we tell about unclear communication of complex ideas, and it goes like this: the expert knows so much that she struggles to translate it. Her thinking is crystalline; only the transmission is fuzzy. Psychologists even gave this a flattering name, the Curse of Knowledge, which implies the problem is an excess of understanding.

I’d like to propose the opposite.

In too many talks, unclear communication is an excuse. What looks like sloppy communication is actually sloppy thinking.

For example, when a leader stands in front of her audience and says the new strategy will lead to “a significant improvement” in efficiency, the conventional diagnosis is that she merely failed to package her insight for the audience in more concrete terms. The actual diagnosis, more often than anyone wants to admit, is that “significant” is the full resolution of her thinking. There is no crisp number behind the fog. The fog is the thought.

This is the dirty secret of abstraction. Words like “significant,” “at scale,” and “a lot” don’t compress meaning. They substitute for it. And because they sound like language a serious person would use, they let us skip the most difficult part of clarity: deciding what we actually mean.

So, when you say “significant”, how much are we talking about? 3 per day? Or 100? And is your definition the same as mine?

Let’s pick a concrete example. Let’s say you’re a car maker and you’re about to host a keynote to introduce your newest model which is remarkably quiet and significantly quieter than existing cars. Now, how quiet is that? What does it really mean?

Rolls Royce was that car maker when they ran this ad:

Crucially, they didn’t say their cars were remarkably quiet. They said that at sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise comes from the electric clock.

Now, it’s easy to dismiss this as clever marketing copy. But notice how these words are anything but grandiose or fancy. It’s plain English, as down-to-earth as it gets. Most importantly, these are very specific words. They require solid knowledge of who it’s for and what matters to them. And, of course, they require someone who actually knows what the loudest noise in the car was. The famous headline is downstream of a specific fact, and the specific fact is downstream of someone doing the work of finding out and relating it to the audience.

That’s the real relationship between clarity and thinking: clarity isn’t how you express a finished thought. Clarity is how you finish the thought. When is quiet quiet enough? And when is it enough to for our audience to care for the number. Can you articulate that?

This is why the moments that count are so revealing. A big presentation is commonly treated as a performance problem, and leaders prepare accordingly: polish the slides, rehearse the delivery, sand the language. Speakers optimize for making the announcement look and sound fancier and more grandiose. Instead of clarifying the thinking underneath and relating it to the audience and the most plain and simple words they can find.

Here’s the thing: Smart audiences aren’t testing your delivery. They’re testing whether your words survive contact with reality.

The boardroom presentation is another great example to see that. Every “a lot”, every “significant improvement,” every “at scale” you use in this moment is a question you decided not to answer about your strategy … knowing that a board’s entire function is to find those questions.

Now, this has happened to all of us. Simply because we’ve been living in our domain for so long. We’ve developed an intuition for “a lot” that allows us to skim over those parts without ever having to specify them to ourselves.

Which is exactly why it can be so hard to find those spots ourselves. We just don’t recognize them (that’s where The Curse of Knowledge does strike). But clarifying them makes the difference between a strategy that sounds smart and one that people know how to act on. A pitch that sounds persuasive and one that actually resonates.

If you want someone who keeps pressing on what you actually mean, how your audience will hear it, and how you can connect the two, that’s what we do in a Clarity Lab. We won’t settle until we’ve found the version that’s clear in thinking and clear in expression.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael