How Direction Flows Through Organizations
Traditional Strategic Planning
You’ve seen it before: Leadership creates a comprehensive strategic plan, presents it to the organization with excitement, and then… nothing happens. Or at least, not what was supposed to happen.
The plan sits on a shelf. Teams nod in meetings but continue doing what they’ve always done. Priorities don’t actually shift. Six months later, leadership is frustrated that “nobody executed the strategy.”
Why traditional planning fails:
Top-down directives don’t get executed because people don’t commit to plans they didn’t help create. You get compliance at best, resistance at worst. Even when people want to execute, they’re operating with incomplete information—trying to implement someone else’s vision without understanding the full context or having input on how it should work in their area.
Most strategic planning assumes that if you just communicate clearly enough, people will adopt what you’ve decided. But that’s not how human beings work, and that’s not how organizations work.
What Is the ClarityCascade?
The ClarityCascade is a fundamentally different approach to strategic planning and execution. Instead of creating the complete strategy at the top and pushing it down, we use a cascading design process where direction flows through the organization and each level contributes to creating the solution.
The Core Concept: Start with WHAT, Let Teams Design HOW
Step 1: Define the WHAT
Leadership establishes the high-level goals—the clear “WHAT” the organization needs to achieve. This is the north star, the destination, the winning aspiration.
Step 2: Teams Design Their HOW
Instead of telling teams exactly how to achieve those goals, leadership works with teams to determine the “HOWs”—the strategies and approaches they’ll use. When people co-create the strategy, they own it. And people execute what they own.
Step 3: The Cascade Happens
Here’s where it gets powerful: Those HOWs become WHATs for the next level down.
- The leadership team’s HOW becomes the department leader’s WHAT
- The department leader’s HOW becomes the team lead’s WHAT
- The team lead’s HOW becomes the frontline’s WHAT
Direction cascades through every level of your organization. Each team understands not just what they’re supposed to do, but why it matters and how it connects to the bigger goal. And critically, each team has designed their portion of the solution.
This isn’t just planning—it’s collaborative design that creates ownership at every level.
Why the ClarityCascade Works
The ClarityCascade simultaneously solves the three problems that keep growing companies stuck:
It Creates Clarity
When high-level goals are clearly established and cascade through the organization, everyone understands where you’re going and why. But it’s not just top-down communication—it’s structured conversation at each level about what success looks like and how to achieve it.
Direction doesn’t get lost in translation because each level is actively engaged in understanding and applying it to their area. The cascade ensures that by the time strategy reaches the frontline, it’s not a vague directive—it’s a clear, actionable plan they helped create.
It Builds Unity
People don’t resist strategies they help design. When your team co-creates the solution at each level, it becomes “our plan” not “his plan.”
This is fundamentally different from “getting buy-in.” Buy-in assumes people will adopt what you’ve decided. Unity means people are genuinely committed because they contributed to the design. They’re not executing your strategy—they’re executing a strategy they own.
The ClarityCascade creates unity through co-creation, not through persuasion.
It Develops Capacity
As the cascade flows through your organization, something remarkable happens: the systems and structure you need emerge naturally from the collaborative design process.
Teams identify what they need to execute successfully—the processes, tools, roles, and capabilities required. Because they’re designing it themselves (with guidance), they’re building organizational muscle, not just following a playbook.
This is how you develop capacity without creating bureaucracy. Structure emerges from collaborative design rather than being imposed from above.