When growth gets hard, we interrogate the scoreboard. The leverage was always in the clarity.

There's a short video on my Relativity website site where I walk through a small equation that explains a very large problem. This is the written version.

Here's the equation: Effectiveness = Momentum × Clarity²®

It's a deliberate nod to the one everyone knows E = mc² but pointed at your commercial system instead of the universe.

Momentum is the people, systems and execution you can mobilise.

Clarity is how clearly the whole business holds together: how you operate, how you create and prove value to your buyers and customers, how you work together across functions, how you intend to grow and what might stop you and how precisely all of that turns into goals, priorities and decisions.

And the two don't add. They multiply.

Why multiplication changes everything

That one detail is where most enterprises quietly come undone. If effectiveness were Momentum plus Clarity, you could compensate for fuzzy direction with sheer activity pile on enough momentum and you'd eventually get there. But it's multiplication. Low clarity doesn't subtract from your effectiveness; it caps it. You can have the most energetic, best-resourced, hardest-working organisation in your market and convert almost none of it into value, because all of that energy is being mobilised against a business that three functions quietly understand three different ways.

And clarity is squared. Small fuzziness doesn't cost you a little, it costs you exponentially, because every downstream decision inherits and multiplies the ambiguity above it. When the business is genuinely clear, each action amplifies the last. When it's fuzzy, each action drifts a little further from the others, and the drift compounds.

What we actually do when growth gets hard

So watch what happens when growth gets hard. I'll tell you what I see, because I've done it myself.

The first thing we do is interrogate the scoreboard. More forecasts, more pipeline reviews, more dashboards. We argue about the number, re-slice it, attach incentives to it, put it under brighter and brighter light. And when that doesn't move it, we reach for momentum, a new platform, a reorg, another programme because activity at least feels like progress.

Both of those feel like the hard work. Neither of them is. And the reason is sitting in the equation.

Effectiveness — the E — is a result. It's on the left of the equals sign. You can scrutinise it, gamify it and bonus it all you like; you cannot move it by staring at it, because it's downstream of the two things that actually produce it. And of those two, we pour ourselves into Momentum, the term that's merely multiplied and leave Clarity, the term that's squared, almost untouched. Not because we don't know it matters. Because it's the uncomfortable one. Doing the clarity work means admitting the business isn't as clear as the strategy deck says.

The cost has a name

There's a name for the cost of all this, and it's worth saying out loud: Diagnosis Debt. It's what you accumulate every time you act before you've actually understood every time you measure harder or buy faster instead of getting clear. Like technical debt, it compounds. Each initiative built on a misread of the business adds to the bill, paid back in effort that cancels itself out and growth that won't compound. The symptoms get louder; delay, duplication, rework, leadership drag and the cause stays hidden, because it was never a momentum problem and it was never a measurement problem. It was a clarity problem wearing both as a disguise.

The hopeful part

Now the part that actually matters, and the reason this is a hopeful message rather than a critical one.

You don't pay down Diagnosis Debt by buying more, or by measuring harder. You pay it down by acknowledging it, naming, honestly and out loud, where the business isn't actually clear. Where two leaders own the same decision. Where the customer means three different things to three teams. Where the strategy on the slide and the strategy in the incentives don't match. That naming feels like exposing a weakness. It's the opposite. It's the first real clarity work you've done in a while and the moment you start, you are already halfway there. The hardest step in fixing fuzzy clarity is admitting your momentum, and your scoreboard, were built on it. Everything after that is just doing the work.

So if you do one thing this week, don't buy anything and don't open the dashboard. Ask your leadership team, separately, to write down what the business is actually trying to win, then compare the answers. The gaps you find are your clarity, becoming visible. That's where it starts.

The Relativity System (Discovery) exists to do the clarity work properly, to make a business legible enough to see where the fuzziness actually is, before anyone spends another pound, or another quarter, manufacturing momentum and re-forecasting a number on top of it.

Everyone fights over the E and pours themselves into the M. The leverage was always in the C.

So if you want growth that compounds, start there. Not with the number, and not with another programme with clarity: on how the business actually operates, how it creates and proves value to customers, how it works together, how it intends to grow and what might stop it, and how precisely all of that becomes real decisions.

That's the work. And it starts the moment you're willing to find out how clear you actually are.

Find out how clear you actually are the free, fifteen-minute directional self-assessment. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.hiya.marketing/_files/ugd/75c334_693d5dd14f8045d1be372bcf34bb05fa.pdf