Making the Complex Legible
Everyone says simplify, that's usually the wrong instruction
In my intro article I wrote that over two decades in, whatever the title, the job comes down to three things: solving problems, removing friction, and making the complex legible. The first two are well understood. The third gets treated as a soft skill - something you do at the end, once the real work is finished, to explain it to people who weren’t in the room. I’ve come to think it’s the reverse. Legibility is most of the job, and it decides whether the rest of it lands. The clarity you create early pays back for a long time afterward.
Legible Is Not the Same as Simple
The common mistake is to treat legibility as simplification. The two pull in opposite directions.
Simplifying strips detail until the thing is small enough to hold. Do enough of it and you strip the detail that mattered, and end up with something clean, confident and quite possibly wrong. Legibility removes only the detail that carries no weight, keeps every piece that does, and arranges what’s left so someone who wasn’t there can reason about it correctly. Done well, the same clarity serves everyone who touches the work - strategy and delivery alike - and it compounds: each person reasons from the same sound picture, and the wrong version stops multiplying.
That takes knowing which detail carries weight, which is comprehension, not communication. Someone who can only flatten a problem into something reassuring usually doesn’t understand it well enough to know what they’re throwing away. Done honestly, legibility is a test of your own grasp before it’s a service to anyone else. If you can’t make a thing legible without making it wrong, you don’t understand it yet.
The Dangerous Kind of Clear
There’s a failure worse than a confusing explanation, and it rarely gets flagged because it doesn’t look like failure: a version clean enough that everyone feels they understand, and a confident decision made on a picture that was missing the one thing that mattered. Call it false legibility.
Confusion, at least, is self-correcting - if a point doesn’t land, someone asks. A tidy slide that quietly buries the risk invites no questions, because there’s nothing on it to question. The neater the summary, the more completely the risk disappears, and the more assured the decision built on top of it. Beautiful information can carry a worse decision than messy information ever would, and it’s harder to catch, because everyone felt well served at the time.
The way through isn’t to make the picture uglier but to give the risk the same treatment as everything else - stated clearly, concisely, legibly. The method is the only part of this I’d call simple. The instinct behind false legibility is rarely dishonesty; it’s the wish to look composed, to have it all appear handled. The honest version keeps the one uncomfortable caveat in view exactly where it bears on the decision, even if that makes things look less tidy. That’s the trade, and it’s a good one: surfacing the risk early and plainly is what earns trust, not the polish that hides it.
Translating Into the Right Currency
Done well, legibility isn’t shorter. It’s reframed.
A technical fact has to be expressed in the currency its audience actually holds, which is rarely technical. A board reasons in cost, risk, time and optionality; a CFO wants to know what a decision buys and what it forecloses. A fact stated in the terms it was true in can’t be weighed until it becomes a consequence someone can act on. “The platform is three major versions behind” lands as nothing. “We’re one vendor decision away from a forced migration we haven’t budgeted for” is the same fact, made legible.
That translation is where the real thinking sits, and it has to survive into the finished piece - the deck, the memo, the summary - whoever assembles it. It means holding the technical truth and its business consequence in view at once and building an honest bridge between them, which only works if you understand both ends. It’s also why the task resists delegation: the person furthest from the detail is the least able to judge which detail can safely go.
A Leadership Duty, Not a Nicety
None of this is a communication nicety. The quality of any decision is bounded by the legibility of what it rests on - people act on the version in front of them, not the reality underneath. When a decision goes wrong, the easy story is that whoever made it didn’t understand. More often the reality was never made legible enough to understand, and that responsibility sits with the person who did understand it. Owning that is part of the job, not an accusation against anyone who had to decide.
It gets harder with scope, not easier. The more ground you cover, the more people are acting on your account of something rather than the detail itself. Translation stacks up - each honest pass drops a little more of the load-bearing detail, until what’s left is a summary of a summary that no longer resembles the thing. Staying able to produce the honest, full-resolution version yourself, rather than relying on the flattened one you’re left with, is one of the few defences against that drift.
The Test That Actually Matters
The pull is to measure legibility by whether the room understood you. That’s the wrong test - understanding is easy to feel and easy to manufacture; a capable presenter can produce the sensation of clarity in an audience that has grasped nothing usable.
The real test comes later. Did they decide well? Could the person you handed it to reason their way to a sound call, including the parts that were inconvenient to leave in? Making the complex legible was never about being understood, or admired. It’s about leaving other people genuinely able to act. Everything else is presentation - and on a hard decision, presentation is just a nicer way to get it wrong.