Breakthroughs in the Blur: Why "Unclear" Thinking Sometimes Leads to Innovation
I've watched the same dynamic play out in dozens of organizations. Someone brilliant in casual conversation (the type who connects user research to technical decisions to business strategy with startling clarity) sits down in a stakeholder meeting and transforms into a buzzword generator.
“The conversion metrics indicate potential UX friction that may impact our strategic KPIs.”
What they actually meant: “This feels like trying to order coffee from someone who's never had coffee.”
Square peg, round hole
Organizations inadvertently train their best systems thinkers to self-censor. They do this through the subtle requirement that every insight fit existing departmental vocabularies.
I recently observed a product team debating user onboarding. Data analyst presented metrics. Designer shared research. Engineer explained constraints. All valuable. All separate.
A designer notices that the technical architecture is creating user experience problems, but gets told “that's not a design issue, that's engineering.” Meanwhile, an engineer sees that the business requirements are creating technical debt, but gets redirected to “just focus on implementation.”
Everyone stays in their lane while the real problem lives in the intersection that no one is allowed to address. The most valuable observations get dismissed because they cross organizational boundaries that people, for some reason are supposed to respect.
These dismissals contribute to the Clarity Trap: the organizational overhead created when intersectional thinking gets forced into disciplinary silos. The cognitive energy that should go toward problem-solving gets spent on linguistic performance instead. Worse, it sometimes gets transformed into business speak —the clearest manifestation of confirmation biases.
The Clarity Trap
Here's what I've noticed about organizational behaviour: most people have been trained to equate “clear” with “fits familiar categories” when actually the most valuable insights often feel unclear at first because they're reorganizing how we see the problem entirely.
We've collectively learned to trust thinking that sounds like what we already know, and distrust thinking that makes us reconsider our frameworks. But the second type is often where novel, innovative solutions come from.
When someone says “this onboarding feels like asking people to prove they're not robots by solving calculus,” that might sound less "clear" than “conversion rates show friction in the user journey.” But the first observation is actually reorganizing how we understand the entire problem, the second one stating the outcome. One offers insight into the why, the other confirms the what, showing how qualitative understanding and quantitative measurement are two sides of the same coin.
Breakthroughs: Residing in Liminal Spaces
Some successful organizations have figured out something counterintuitive: they've learned to sit with the temporary discomfort of insights that don't immediately fit their frameworks.
Take how doctors figured out ulcers. For decades, everyone “knew” they were caused by stress and spicy food. Then two researchers suggested they were actually bacterial infections, and hence treatable with antibiotics. The medical establishment resisted because it crossed boundaries between gastroenterology, infectious disease, and pharmacology in ways that just felt wrong.
The discomfort isn't a bug. It's a feature. It means someone's thinking in a way that doesn't fit the usual boxes, and that's often exactly where the breakthroughs hide.
