Connecting the dots - communicating with purpose

Why half a story is worse than none

I’m writing this at two out of ten.

Not the farm’s usual arithmetic — rain gauges, row spacing, how many hands it takes to bring a harvest in. Mine. Most days I run at an eight, sometimes better. This week I’m a two. Maybe a three on the mornings the coffee works.

Brené Brown tells a story from her waitressing years in Atlas of the Heart. In restaurant slang, “in the weeds” means you’re stressed but still in the fight — you can delegate your way out. Take tea to table twelve, bread to fifteen. “Blown” is different. When a server says I’m blown, the kitchen goes quiet. Someone pulls their tickets. Their tables get covered. And they go stand in the cooler for ten minutes. No shame. No negotiation. All stop.

I’m blown.

So this week I did the only useful thing a blown leader can do. I told my farm hands the whole story. Not “I’m fine, just tired.” The whole story: I’m burnt out. Here’s what that means. Here’s what I can’t carry right now. Here’s why I need you to carry more of it.

They didn’t blink. They re-sorted the week. C took the jobs that need judgment, not just hands. The farm didn’t stop. I did.

Here’s the part worth sitting with: the hard bit wasn’t asking for help. The hard bit was handing over the context. It would have been easier — quicker, less exposed — to quietly reassign tasks and say nothing. But tasks without context is how you get a farm run on guesswork.

Which brings me to a leadership team I’ve been coaching.

(Details changed and composited to protect confidentiality. The pattern, unfortunately, is fully intact.)

They’re a company that prizes velocity above everything. Speed is the culture, the compliment, and the weapon. Get labelled a bottleneck and you’re either publicly shamed or a battering ram is dispatched to your calendar. Every velocity culture has one. The shadow side: nobody slows anything down. Including the things that badly need slowing.

Late last year, leadership made a promise about pay they couldn’t keep. Then they kept not keeping it, quietly, hoping nobody would do the math. Then the performance cycle landed badly on top of it. People got grumpy. Then vocal. Then vocal on the internet. Then gone.

To their credit, leadership eventually apologized. They ran AMAs — which, judging by the questions that actually got answered, may stand for Avoid Most Answers. And then they made the error that turned a bad quarter into a bad year.

They apologized for the mistake — and hoarded the recovery.

Follow the dots they never connected out loud. The broken promise drove people out. The departures — and the reviews those people left behind — made hiring harder. The hiring gap forced a reshuffle of the entire second-half plan. And the reshuffle confused everyone who’d never been told about the chain that caused it.

The leadership team took all of this into a room, closed the door, and tasked... the recruiting team.

Not the company. Not the people living inside the consequences, who could see the dots but not the lines between them. Nobody said the one sentence that would have changed everything:

We broke something. It’s made everything downstream harder. We need your help to turn it around.

They didn’t trust their people with the full story. So their people did what people always do with half a story — they wrote the other half themselves. And the versions we write in our own heads at 2am are never the generous ones.

Connecting the dots isn’t a communications exercise. It’s an act of trust. It says: you’re adults, this is the real situation, and you’re part of the solution — not an audience for the apology.

That’s what context actually is. Not more information. The relative weight of things. Why this matters more than that. What sits upstream of your work and what breaks downstream of it. The political weather. The honest state of the person leading you.

I handed Chett and Brenda the full context this week. It cost me some pride and bought me a farm that runs while I recover. My clients withheld it. It cost them their best people and bought them a review page nobody wants to be quoted on.

There’s a fuller framework underneath all this — performance as a function of drive, clarity, and context — but that’s a post for when I’m back above a five.

For now, a question: where in your world are people acting on half a story? And what would it cost you — really — to tell them the rest?

I’ll be in the cooler.