There is a movie playing in your head.

It is playing twenty four hours a day. It is in high definition. It has surround sound. In this movie, you see exactly what your company looks like in five years. You see the satisfied customers. You see the sleek product design. You see the culture of innovation and the specific way your team handles a crisis.

It is beautiful.

And it is driving you crazy.

It drives you crazy because when you walk into your office or log onto Slack, the reality you see does not match the movie. You see a support rep sending a generic email that lacks empathy. You see a marketing campaign that uses the wrong shade of blue. You see a sales team chasing the wrong kind of lead.

You feel a rising tide of frustration. You wonder why they simply cannot get it. You explained this at the all hands meeting last month. You sent an email about it. You wrote it on the About Us page.

Why are they rowing in different directions?

Here is the hard truth that every founder and manager must eventually face.

Your vision is not a shared reality. It is a private hallucination.

Until you learn the specific mechanics of broadcasting that signal effectively, your team is operating in the dark. They are not trying to sabotage you. They are simply guessing. And when people guess, they usually guess wrong.

We need to dismantle the assumption that clarity is automatic. We need to look at why vision fails to stick and how to turn your internal dream into a practical, operational compass for your people.

The Curse of Knowledge

There is a psychological concept called the Curse of Knowledge. It is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand.

You have lived with your business idea for years. You know the backstory of every decision. You know why you pivoted in 2019. You know why you value speed over perfection, or perhaps perfection over speed.

Your employees do not have this context.

When you say a phrase like “world class customer service,” your brain activates a complex web of memories and standards. You think of the Ritz Carlton. You think of that time a waiter sprinted to get you a fresh fork.

When your employee hears “world class customer service,” their brain activates a completely different set of data. They might think it means “answering the phone quickly.” Or they might think it means “giving the customer a refund.”

Those are two different behaviors.

Because you are cursed with your own deep knowledge, you assume your shorthand is sufficient. You assume that when you say “innovative,” they know you mean “take risks even if you fail.” But they might hear “innovative” and think “use new software but do not break anything.”

This gap is where the friction lives.

To close it, you have to stop speaking in headlines and start speaking in behaviors. You have to lower the resolution of your language from abstract concepts to concrete actions.

Do not tell them to be “professional.” Tell them that being professional means we arrive to meetings five minutes early and we do not use slang in client emails.

Specifics breed alignment. Abstractions breed confusion.

The Myth of the Single Announcement

How many times have you said something once and assumed it was heard?

There is a classic mistake in leadership where the manager believes that communication is an event. You book a conference room. You order pizza. You put up a slide deck. You give a rousing speech about the new direction of the company.

Everyone claps. You leave feeling good.

But biology is working against you. Human beings forget nearly fifty percent of new information within one hour. By the next day, that number drops even lower.

Furthermore, your team is bombarded with noise. They have overflowing inboxes. They have Slack notifications. They have their own life stresses. Your visionary speech is just one more signal in a noisy world.

To break through the noise, you must embrace the discipline of repetition.

Marketing experts say that a customer needs to see a brand message seven times before they even notice it. Your employees are your internal customers. They need to hear the vision seven times, in seven different ways, before it begins to sink into their long term memory.

You have to become the Chief Reminding Officer.

This feels tedious. You will feel like a broken record. You will feel like you are treating them like children. You are not. You are simply respecting the biology of attention.

If you are bored of saying it, they are just starting to hear it.

Are you weaving the vision into your Tuesday status updates? Are you referencing it in your one on one reviews? Are you using it to explain why you rejected a project?

If the vision only lives in the annual kickoff meeting, it is not a vision. It is a souvenir.

Turning Vision into a Decision Filter

The ultimate goal of broadcasting your vision is not to inspire people. Inspiration is cheap and it fades quickly.

The goal is to enable decentralized decision making.

You want to build a business where you do not have to be in the room for the right decision to be made. You want to de-stress your life by knowing that your team has the tools to navigate a crisis without calling you on vacation.

To do this, you must convert your vision from a poster on the wall into a filter for choices.

Let us imagine a company with a vision of “Radical Transparency.”

That is a nice slogan. But how does it help a junior account manager who just realized they made a billing error that cost the client five hundred dollars?

They have two choices. They can hide the error and fix it quietly. Or they can call the client, admit the mistake, and apologize.

If the vision is just words, they will hide it. Fear wins.

But if you have operationalized the vision, they know what to do. You have told stories about transparency. You have publicly rewarded people who owned up to mistakes. You have made it clear that we value truth over comfort.

So the account manager calls the client. They use the vision as a compass.

You need to audit your current values. Are they actionable?

If you value “Excellence,” what does that mean when a project is running late? Does it mean we ship it late to get it right? Or does it mean we ship it on time and fix it later?

Your team does not know unless you tell them.

Take your top three values and write down a “This, Not That” list for each one. Give your team the cheat codes for how you want them to behave when no one is watching.

The Feedback Loop of Understanding

Finally, you need to verify the signal.

Most managers end a conversation by asking, “Does that make sense?”

This is the worst question in the English language. It forces the other person to lie. Of course they will say yes. They do not want to look stupid. They do not want to annoy you. They want to get back to work.

So they nod. And you walk away thinking you are aligned.

To truly broadcast your vision, you need to use a technique called back briefing. This comes from the military.

After you explain the mission or the vision, you ask the team member to explain it back to you in their own words.

“Just so I know I explained this clearly, how would you describe our goal for this quarter to a new hire?”

“What do you think is the most important part of what we just discussed?”

When they answer, you will immediately see the gaps. You will see where they misunderstood the priority. You will see where they are holding onto old assumptions.

This is not a test of their intelligence. It is a test of your communication.

If they cannot explain it simply, you have not explained it well enough.

This creates a safety valve. It allows you to correct the course before they spend three weeks building the wrong thing. It turns the monologue into a dialogue.

It requires humility. It requires you to stop being the genius on the mountain and start being the guide on the trail.

Building the Cathedral

There is an old story about three stone masons.

A traveler asks the first mason what he is doing. He looks exhausted and says, “I am laying bricks.”

The traveler asks the second mason. He says, “I am building a wall.”

The traveler asks the third mason. He looks up with a gleam in his eye and says, “I am building a cathedral.”

Your job as the leader is not to teach people how to lay bricks. They know how to do their technical jobs. Your job is to remind them, every single day, that they are building a cathedral.

Work is hard. It is often repetitive and stressful. Without a clear connection to a larger purpose, it becomes drudgery. It becomes a trade of time for money.

But when a team sees the vision, when they understand how their small contribution fits into the larger picture, the energy changes. The stress becomes manageable because it has meaning.

You have that picture in your head. It is vibrant and alive.

Do not keep it to yourself.

Broadcast it. Repeat it. Define it. Live it.

Give your team the gift of knowing exactly where they are going.