Role clarity is one of the five things a plan depends on, and it is the one most often assumed rather than checked.
Why it matters when the plan changes
An unclear role produces effort pointed in a slightly wrong direction by a person doing their best, which is more expensive than obvious idleness and much harder to see. It also produces duplication at the edges, where two people each believe an outcome is theirs, and gaps where neither does. Role is one of several things a plan depends on, alongside priority; Sull, Homkes and Sull found in 2015 that only 11% of managers believed their strategic priorities were properly resourced, a related failure of clarity.
The tension is between clarity and flexibility. Roles defined tightly are clear and brittle; roles defined loosely flex and leave the edges undefined, which is exactly where the plan usually runs. The workable balance defines the decisions and the outcomes precisely and leaves the methods open, which is the reverse of how most role descriptions are actually written. A sound job analysis produces a valid task list covering duty areas and tasks, a discipline role descriptions rarely apply to themselves.
In practice
A restructure moves two functions under one leader and neither role description is updated. Both teams continue owning the same customer outcome from different angles. Six months of effort goes into a duplication nobody chose, and it presents as a personality clash between two managers who are each doing what their role says.
Evidence
Role is one of the five clarities a plan depends on, and clarity about what is expected is not widely reported.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review (2015)A sound job analysis produces a valid task list covering duty areas and related tasks.
Job analysis, Wikipedia (2026)
What it cannot tell you
Role clarity tells you whether a person knows what they own; it says nothing about whether the role itself is well designed, properly resourced, or worth the outcome it is meant to deliver. A person can be entirely clear about a role that is badly structured or poorly placed in the plan.
Questions
A job description is a document; clarity is a state in the person's head. The Wikipedia entry on job analysis (2026) notes that a sound process produces a valid task list covering duty areas and related tasks, yet the document is rarely rechecked once the organisation changes, so the two diverge fast.
Effort pointed slightly in the wrong direction by people doing their best, duplication at the boundaries between roles, and outcomes nobody picks up because each party assumes the other one has. It rarely looks like confusion from outside; it usually looks like friction between two individuals.
By naming the decisions and outcomes each role owns, in writing, and being explicit about what it does not own. That is a conversation rather than a project, which is why it sits on the cheapest rung of the available interventions and is so often skipped.
Tightly on decisions and outcomes, loosely on methods. Defining how someone should do the work constrains them without clarifying anything; defining what they own and what they decide clarifies while leaving them room to work. Most role descriptions manage to do exactly the reverse.
Whenever the structure or the plan changes and the descriptions do not, which is nearly every reorganisation. Sull, Homkes and Sull's 2015 Harvard Business Review research found only 11% of managers believed their priorities were properly resourced, a parallel sign of how quickly clarity erodes once conditions shift.