Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Windowpane Test: What Orwell Knew About Honest Leadership
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Window Pane Test, What Orwell Knew About Honest Leadership. Here we go. There's a moment every leader knows. You're staring at a draft, a memo, an update, A difficult message to the team and it just will not come out clean. You keep adding qualifiers, you keep softening the verbs, you keep circling the actual point instead of landing on it. And usually that struggle on the page is telling you something true about what's happening in your head. George Orwell put it simply when he said good prose is like a window pane. The whole purpose of a window is that you look through it, not at it. You're not supposed to notice the glass. You're supposed to see clearly what's on the other side. Orwell was not handing out writing tips. He was making a much bigger argument about honesty. He believed that language which draws attention to itself, that hides behind big words and soft qualifiers and clever phrasing is very often language with something to hide. Fog is not usually an accident. Fog is often a choice, even an unconscious one, made by someone who has not fully decided what they think. Or who has decided and doesn't want to say it plainly. Every leader has lived this moment, a strategy update that needs three rereads before anyone can find the decision inside it. A difficult message so wrapped in cushioning that the actual point disappears entirely. A performance conversation that talks around the issue for twenty minutes before anyone names it. In each case, the natural read is that the person is being careful, being diplomatic, protecting feelings. And sometimes that's true, but often something else is going on. Here's a common misread. We tell ourselves that complexity in our language reflects complexity in the situation, that the topic is nuanced, so of course the message has to be layered and careful. But nuance and fog are not the same thing. Nuance is precision about something genuinely complicated. Fog is imprecision about something you have not fully resolved yourself. So here's the reframe. Confusion on the page is almost always confusion somewhere upstream. Either you have not actually decided what you think, or you have decided and you're reluctant to say it out loud. The writing is not the problem, the writing is just the messenger. Clear writers write clearly because they've already done the harder work, the work of deciding. This becomes sharper, not softer, in a world full of AI tools. Any of us can now produce fluent, polished, grumpy. Dramatically perfect language in seconds. Fluency has become cheap. It used to be a decent proxy for someone who knew what they were talking about. It no longer is. What a tool cannot manufacture for you is judgment. It cannot decide on your behalf what you actually believe and whether you have the nerve to say it plainly. That's is is still entirely on you. If anything, the easy availability of polished language. raises the value of a leader who says the true thing simply because that clarity can no longer be faked by effort alone. So here's a reflection to carry forward. Before you send the next hard message, ask yourself honestly whether the complexity on the page reflects the complexity of the situation or whether it reflects your own hesitation to land on a position. Read it out loud before you send it. If it sounds evasive spoken aloud, it's going to read that way too No matter how carefully it's phrased. Now, to bring it back to where we started, good prose is like a windowpane, Orwell said, not because plain language is easier to produce. Often it's harder. It requires you to actually resolve the thing you're trying to say and then have the nerve to say it without hiding behind the glass. That's not a writing skill, that's a leadership skill, and it's one worth practicing every time you sit down to write something that matters.