The clarity trap

Greg McKeown, writing for Harvard Business Review in The disciplined pursuit of less:

Why don’t successful people and organizations automatically become very successful? One important explanation is due to what I call “the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases:

• Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
• Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
• Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
• Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, success is a catalyst for failure.

And Horace Dediu, in his recent article Think small:

Understanding the “fundamentals” of a product is far more important than having lots of products for the sake of diversification alone.

The fundamentals of a product are knowing its job to be done and thus its requirements which, when well executed, will position it precisely and unambiguously on an opportunity.

These two ideas sit neatly together. McKeown describes the organisational problem: success creates options, and options diffuse the focus that made the success possible. Dediu describes the product version of the same problem. More products do not automatically mean more opportunity if the company has lost sight of the job each product is meant to do.

This is why focus often becomes harder after success. Early on, constraints do some of the discipline for you. Later, the company has enough money, attention and confidence to chase every adjacent opportunity that looks plausible. Many of them will look plausible. That is the danger.

The better test is not whether the company can do more. It is whether doing more makes the product clearer, sharper and more useful. Diversification without fundamentals is just distraction with a budget.