Too many cooks

I recently ran a whiteboarding session with a client as part of our usual Red Shift process: distilling the what of an idea into the how, before finally moving onto the when.

It's simple. We take the origin of an idea, walk the client through our structure, and require them to define exactly what outcome they expect — and, crucially, the most significant implications that follow from it. That stage alone often exposes paradoxes, contradictions, and gaps.

To me, this is routine. Yet in many companies we work with, this kind of session is treated as alien — even groundbreaking. There are five reasons that come to mind which might explain why this discipline is so seemingly rare.

1. Culture — people are afraid of friction

To refine an idea into something measurable and buildable, you need friction: challenge, debate, concede, resist, "passionate discussion", occasional swearing. Politically minded environments find this threatening. But from a Product–Engineering perspective, it is absolutely essential. Mission clarity only emerges when ideas are interrogated — not rubber-stamped.

Without psychological safety and radical intellectual honesty — especially from leadership — you cannot refine vague ideas into actionable requirements. No process or framework can compensate for the absence of this basic reality check.

2. Scale — clarity decays at every handover

The larger the organisation, the further an idea travels before anyone writes a line of code: CEO → CTO → Product Manager → Project Manager → Delivery Manager → Scrum Master → Lead Engineer → Engineer. At every exchange scope mutates, clarity erodes, interpretations multiply. Key personalities frequently mistake "ownership" for "iteration rights," modifying concepts before passing them down. By the time the engineer receives it, the original intent is often unrecognisable.

3. Small teams are not the only answer

A superficial reading suggests the solution is to keep companies — or teams — small. Intuitive, but not true. Large organisations can maintain clarity. The US tech giant Asurion, for example, excels with the Product–Engineering handshake: clear boundaries, clear expectations, minimal middle management, compartmentalised teams, small tightly collaborative working groups. It's not size that kills clarity — it's structure.

4. Sometimes the ask is simply too big

This isn't ideation vs execution. It's complexity vs your organisation's working memory. Some requests are too large or too intertwined to execute as a single project. Take migrating tens of millions of CRM records. The logical approach: discovery, greenfield build of the new CRM, alignment with existing documented processes, refined mock migration, testing, staged live migration, final full migration.

Trying to rebuild the CRM, deprecate the old one, and migrate all live data in one heroic push is, if we're being charitable, illogical. Even the best engineers in the world cannot survive irrational planning.

5. Stay single-threaded

Another clarity-killer: brilliant teams being pulled in too many directions. I've lost count of how many brilliant people I've seen punished for competence by being loaded with ever more parallel work, often of inconsistent priority, until something inevitably slips.

No matter how capable you are, you will always perform better doing one thing at a time than two things simultaneously. If you need your team to deliver three things quickly, having them attempt all three at once guarantees that each will be exponentially slower. The correct approach is: do one thing exceptionally well, finish it, then move to the next.

The tell-tale sign is the company roadmap. Ask yourself: is it clear, is it realistic, has everyone seen it, does everyone understand it, does it override everything else in priority? If the answer to any of those is no, you're probably multi-threaded in all the wrong ways.

The simple rule

If you cannot express your idea clearly in a one-page document that your own team can digest immediately, the probability of that recipe surviving intact as it passes from one cook to another is effectively zero. When it comes to preserving clarity: less is more.