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Making your messages easy to agree

Why do so many messages get polite applause but don’t change anything at all?

Applause happens when a message is easy to accept.
Action happens when a message is impossible to ignore.

People obsesses over the first but too often neglect the second.

They work hard to make their case as easy to agree as possible.

They predict objections and proactively address them.

They care deeply that the logic holds and people understand it effortlessly.

But understanding is passive.

→ If your audience can agree with you without changing anything, they will.

If you want action, your message needs both:

Logic — so people understand what you’re saying.
Urgency — so they can’t ignore what it means.

The latter means, you need to make them feel something.

Show me the data, but also show me why it matters. Now. For me.

Explain the plan, but also make me feel the cost of ignoring it.

Without that emotional friction, the sense that something’s at stake, agreement is the easy way out.

That’s exactly what we work on in a Clarity Lab. I’ve just opened a few spots in the coming weeks.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

How SHARP is your strategy?

A strategy statement has one job: It must help people decide.

Every day across your organization, teams face choices about what to build, fund, prioritize, or abandon. Strategy exists to guide those choices.

Sounds good in theory, but we both know that in practice, it’s almost never that simple. You’ve certainly been in a meeting where that became obvious. The one that got tense when two execs came to opposite conclusions and both of them justified it with “the strategy.”

But you know what? That tense meeting is actually good news. It’s how good ideas become great strategies.

You can think of each decision under a strategy as an experiment. Every time a team uses the strategy to make a decision, the organization learns something about the idea behind it.

Sometimes the choice is straightforward. That’s a validation. Sometimes it exposes ambiguity that needs to be fixed.

Either way, the strategy becomes SHARP through use. Great strategies almost never arrive as finished declarations, but as ideas that are tested against real decisions and refined each time they reveal confusion. Over and over again.

So, how do you deliberately embrace that process?

Here’s a simple way to think about it. When you recognize a tension, go through this loop:

S: Say it simply
Use the most plain and simple words you can find.

H: Hold it up against a real decision
Listen carefully for how others use it in the conversation.

A: Analyze the ambiguity
Pinpoint exactly which words created the competing interpretations.

R: Refine the words
Don’t scrap the whole strategy. Rewrite exactly those words.

P: Prove it works or repeat
Re-apply it to the decision and, if necessary, restart the loop.

That’s it.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

PS: My book The PATH to Strategic Impact has many real life examples of sharp strategy communication.

“I’ve said it three times and people still don’t get it.”

Or maybe they understood you just fine?

Sure, sometimes people don’t get it.
But quite often, they do.

They just don’t agree.
Or they don’t see why it matters to them.
Or they’ve heard you, but nothing in what you said made it worth acting on.

From the outside, all of that looks the same. No change.

And the most comfortable explanation is always: It must be them. They didn’t understand.

But is that plausible? Knowing that these are smart people?

Let’s assume for a moment it’s true. If they truly didn’t get it, the fix is easy. Just explain it better. Maybe ask them, what exactly they didn’t understand and give them the background required to understand it.

But if they got it and still don’t move? That’s a different problem.

Now it’s about relevance.
About tradeoffs.
About whether they believe it’s true. Reasonable. Worth it.

In other words, before repeating it a fourth time, I’d ask:

What if they understood it perfectly?
What might be true for them to still not act?

Then start from what matters to them, not what makes sense to you.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

Where great strategies actually come from

If two people can use your strategy to justify opposite decisions, your strategy is clearly not working.

And it might be the best thing that can happen to your strategy.

Because now you know. You’ve seen exactly where your strategy breaks. And can refine it.

But what usually happens now? Everyone’s frustrated, politics play out behind the scenes, and rather sooner than later the conclusion is that we need a new strategy.

Usually, that’s a mistake.

Why? Because you discard the only concrete evidence you had. The exact moment where reality tested your words and found them wanting.

Granted, a new strategy may sound fresh, but it will be untested again. And so, the cycle repeats, disagreement will happen again, debates follow, politics, frustration, etc.

If this feels familiar, you’re not alone. It happens in almost every organization.

And for very similar reasons:

First, you lack a reliable way to expose where your strategy actually breaks. You sense misalignment, but it shows up as endless discussion rather than a clear diagnosis of which words exactly create the ambiguity.

Second, even when you see the problem, you do not have a method to fix it. The new strategy only repeats the cycle.

Third, you never gain confidence that your strategy will hold under pressure. As proven by experience.

All three problems have the same root.

Your strategy is not being refined where it fails.
Instead, you always start fresh and dismiss the learning.

From a communication perspective, this is a huge mistake.

A strategy is a tool for making decisions. Its words must be precise enough that different people, facing the same situation, arrive at the same conclusion.

New words almost never achieve this. That level of precision doesn’t come from thinking harder in a workshop. It comes from using the strategy in real decisions and fixing the exact places where it breaks.

When I work on this with my clients, we usually do two things:

  1. Take the last decision where people reasonably disagreed.
  2. Find the exact words that allowed both sides to be right.

Now we know what to refine. The trick is then to use the refined words to decide the original question. If it still allows two opposite answers, it’s still not precise enough. And so we refine again.

So we don’t rewrite the whole strategy. We sharpen the words exactly where reality has shown us they fail.

This is how strong strategies are built. And that’s what the debates are for.

They help you turn a good strategy into a great one. One that’s precise enough to guide action.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

Run your leadership message through this test

What, 30 seconds?
Several readers wrote in after yesterday’s post because they doubted you could seriously evaluate a message that quickly.

But I was being serious.

The PATH checks are really simple. With a trained eye, you can sense in 30 seconds if one of the four tests fails.

That’s the beauty of having language to name things. Once you start using the PATH checks to analyze messages, you know what to look for. And so, the four criteria quickly become second nature.

But even if you’re new to it, I stand by the 30 seconds. We’re living in the age of AI. Just ask your favorite chatbot if your message passes the test.

To make this easy for you, I’ve prepared a prompt (see below). Simply paste it, replace the brackets with your message and off you go.

To show you how it works, I’ve run it on a few well-known examples. Really interesting results. See for yourself.

Even better: Run a few of your own leadership messages through it. You might be surprised how many fail the test.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

PATH Check for leadership messages
Copy and paste this prompt:

You are an analytical evaluator of leadership communication. Your task is to assess whether a message passes the PATH clarity test. The goal is not to rewrite the message or give generic advice, but to diagnose how well it satisfies the four conditions that messages must meet to move people.

Analyze the following message:

[PASTE MESSAGE HERE]

Evaluate it according to the PATH framework:

P — Plain and simple
Does the message communicate its meaning immediately without requiring interpretation or translation?

  • Explain whether a typical listener would understand the message instantly.
  • Identify any vague, abstract, or corporate language.
  • If the message requires interpretation, describe what a listener would likely translate it into.

A — Actionable
Does the message make the next step obvious?

  • Identify what a listener would realistically do differently after hearing this message.
  • If no clear action follows, explain why.
  • Distinguish between values, intentions, and concrete implications for behavior.

T — Transformative
Would anything actually change if people took the message seriously?

  • Describe what existing behaviors, priorities, or activities would stop, start, or change.
  • If the message allows everything to continue as before, explain why it lacks transformative force.

H — Heartfelt
Does the message sound like something a real person means?

  • Assess whether the language feels human, sincere, and believable.
  • Identify phrases that feel artificial, corporate, or designed to avoid commitment.
  • Explain whether the message would likely be repeated naturally by others.

Overall PATH Assessment

Provide a concise diagnostic summary:

Plain: Strong / Partial / Weak
Actionable: Strong / Partial / Weak
Transformative: Strong / Partial / Weak
Heartfelt: Strong / Partial / Weak

Then conclude with:

Key Observation:
A short paragraph explaining the most important reason the message would or would not move people.

Do not rewrite the message unless necessary to illustrate a point. Focus on diagnosis rather than advice.

Why is this so rare?

Look at any message that actually moved people. You will find the same four properties every time.

Plain and simple so people understand it immediately.
Actionable so they know what it means for them.
Transformative so something actually changes.
Heartfelt so people believe it.

Conveniently, the four spell PATH.

Once you see the pattern, it feels almost embarrassingly obvious.

Which makes this hard to explain: Why is it so rare?

You would expect to see it everywhere.
Strangely, you don’t.

Most leadership messages fail at least one test. Often more.

Crazy, given that it takes about 30 seconds to test your message against the checklist.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

Why is communication at the top so vague?

Here is something most leadership communication advice completely ignores: The higher you rise as a leader, the harder it becomes to say things plainly.

Which has nothing to do with skill. The reason is much simpler. And it hurts a little:

Clarity creates consequences.

Plain and simple words force a choice. If a CEO says:

“We will exit this business within two years.”

Everyone knows what that means.

If they say:

“We are exploring strategic alternatives to sharpen our portfolio.”

Everyone can keep pretending nothing has changed. And in two years, everyone, including the CEO, can say we did nothing wrong.

So, no. The big words in the second version are not there to make it sound impressive and important.

They are a shield against consequences.

They keep options open.
They delay conflict.
They prevent accountability.

Once you see this, a lot of leadership communication suddenly makes sense.

The endless strategy slogans.
The vague transformations.
The beautiful words that leave everyone asking: “So what exactly should we do differently from now on?”

Those messages are not unclear by accident. They are unclear because clarity would make the consequences unavoidable.

That’s why to me, action is a much more useful lens on leadership communication and the one I focus on in my coaching.

If you look at communication through this lens, it becomes utterly unimportant how impressive your words sound. The only thing that matters is whether you are willing to say something that actually commits the organization to a path.

It makes the usual communication advice sound naive:

“Craft the narrative.”
“Control the message.”
“Tell stories.”

Because that isn’t the issue.
It’s the courage to say what leads to action.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

Make it sound important

“So what was the big message from the meeting?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Come on, there must have been something.”

“They had this whole thing about ‘accelerating operational excellence.’”

“What does that even mean?”

“I think it means we’re fixing the same bug every week.”

“Ah. Why didn’t they just say that?”

Good question.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

How to get to the point

If you could say exactly what you mean without worrying whether it sounds clever or impressive, what would you say?

If you could let go of the judgment of others and tell the story the way you actually feel it, what would you say?

If you could skip the selling and simply get to the point, what would you say?

Why don’t you?

Sometimes we just overthink it.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

What if persuasion is the problem, not the solution?

I bet that not even a single Porsche has ever been sold because of the car’s specs.

I mean, of course there are 100 good reasons for why a Porsche is a great car, especially one that’s better than a Nissan or a Mitsubishi.

The only problem is that there are just as many good reasons that prove the opposite.

The good reasons miss the point of buying a Porsche. This ad gets the point.

People who buy a Porsche don’t buy it for the good reasons. They have very personal reasons for doing so. One is that they are now in a position to make their youth dream come true. They can – finally – afford one.

But this isn’t a post about luxury cars. It’s a general principle in communication that JP Morgan captured brilliantly:

“Every man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”

The more a business is trying to prove their idea with good reasons, the more obvious it is that they have no clue about who their customers really are.

And that’s the problem with persuasion.

Persuasion means finding (more and more) good reasons for why I should buy your idea. While the decision hinges on the real reason why I would buy.

Which is why persuasion feels so exhausting on both sides:

You’re trying to influence a different decision than the one I’m trying to make.

The crucial flip is this.

Don’t ask: “How do we explain our product better?”
Ask: “What decision was our customer already trying to make?”

That’s resonance.

And it’s an entirely different conversation.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

Picture of Dr. Michael Gerharz

Dr. Michael Gerharz