12 of 34 Unlock the Secrets to Smarter Decision-Making with Tom Savard - Episode - 563

After I reflected on the first version of the book, I realized there was a mindset here. I call it the clarity mindset, which are 5 very simple behaviors that leaders can practice that help them create clarity throughout their organizations. So that clarity mindset was kind of the key element, and now I'm focused on helping people leverage this clarity mindset in their organizations.

Innovation is often romanticized, but real progress is built through rigor, feedback, and thoughtful design. Engineering progress in an uncertain world reveals how scientific thinking and leadership discipline converge to create lasting value. Welcome to Streams to Impact, brought to you by Steve Talker Capital. I'm your host, Dr. Allen. We are living in a moment where uncertainty is no longer the exception. It is the operating environment. Technology accelerates, markets shift, industries converge, currencies are questioned. The long-assumed stability of the dollar is being challenged through de-dollarization and its accompanying devaluation, and geopolitical and economic fault lines are increasingly visible across global landscapes. Many high-achieving professionals find themselves navigating not just change, but layered uncertainty that touches markets, institutions, and everyday life. What once worked reliably now feels fragile. Expertise is still valuable, but the systems surrounding that expertise— financial, economic, and geopolitical— are evolving faster than most were prepared for. Yet throughout history, progress has never belonged to those who waited for certainty, It has belonged to those who understand how to think clearly inside complexity, how to build systems that adapt, and how to lead with discipline rather than fear. That is what today's conversation is about. Not prediction, but design. Not reaction, but intention. And not short-term wins, but progress that holds up over time. Beyond the Paycheck is the Financial Clarity Compass, an instructional mini masterclass created by me. This private educational experience is our gift to you, designed to help high-achieving professionals step back, gain clarity, and begin aligning their work, capital, and purpose with long-term impact. To claim your gift, go to www.go.steedtucker.com/beyond-paycheck. Just a brief disclaimer before we begin. All information shared on Streams to Impact is for educational purposes only. It is not intended as investment, financial, legal, or tax advice. All investment carries risk, including the possible loss of principal. You should not invest unless you are prepared to lose 100% of your investment, and you're always encouraged to consult your legal, accounting, and tax advisors before making any investment decisions.

What does it look like to lead when complexity is the constant and certainty is gone? Well, today's guest, Tom Savard, brings a rare combination of scientific discipline and real-world leadership. With a PhD in physics from Duke University and more than 25 years in senior product and technology leadership roles, Tom has helped organizations across medical, aerospace, and telecommunication industries turn complexity into operational clarity and sustained value. As a certified Six Sigma and Design for Six Sigma Master Black Belt, Tom has spent his career designing systems that perform under pressure. He has published more than 20 technical papers, spoken at major conferences, and since 2012 has led a successful consulting practice helping leaders harness technology, And innovation with intention rather than reactivity. Yet what makes Tom's perspective especially compelling is that he does not treat innovation as an abstract theory. He sees it as a human endeavor and one that requires discipline, creativity, and humility. Outside the boardroom, Tom brings that same integration to life as a performing saxophonist, Sharing the stage with his wife, Linda, in the original band Necessary Diversions. So welcome, Tom. We're glad that you are with us today.

Thank you.

And so let's go into this. If you'll look back across your life and career, when have you personally felt most alive, clear, and aligned? And when have you found yourself operating Oh, that's a really good question.

So, you know, over the course of my career, I've had the luxury of having different roles in different technologies. And I would say one of the best opportunities was at a company called Transition Networks, where I had the opportunity to lead several functions that were supportive of product development. And in doing that, I was able to give each of those teams more clarity in how they were working together, and that helped us make significant improvements to their return on investment. To contrast that, I've had moments in my career where I was working in positions that weren't really aligned with accelerating product development, which is my passion. And those were times— I don't say that I regret them, but those are times where I felt like I wasn't contributing to my highest potential.

Yeah, I know how those different feelings can be, as I found myself in different positions that inspired and brought out the passion in others that just kind of drained.

Yeah, yeah.

So you have spent many decades helping teams move faster and create more value. So from your perspective, What truly enables speed and agility, and what do leaders often mistake for progress that actually slows everything down?

Yeah, I think the key to accelerating value is clarity. That's the first thing that has to happen within an organization. And when I mean clarity, I mean purpose, so purpose behind the work. Oftentimes, leaders, when they are under pressure, will resort to a mode of engaging their teams, which is around doing and actions. And that might look good in the short term, but oftentimes, when assumptions change or risks materialize, because they haven't provided their teams the context of their work, teams end up slowing down and bogging down. And if they had provided clarity from the start, they would have enabled those teams to be agile and respond more quickly to the changes that were happening.

Yeah, I think that's certainly true in life. And I can certainly see how it could do the same in organizations. So how do you help leaders in organizations find clarity that really leads them to understanding, I think, really from a personal perspective, what is their personal purpose and how do they bring that into an organizational perspective?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, when I started to write my book, it's called The Clarity Cascade. It began as an anthology of stories about how I've been able to accelerate value, improve return on investment within within product development organizations. And as I wrote the first draft, I realized that there were some common themes that came up in each of those examples of accelerating value. And after I reflected on the first version of the book, I realized there was a mindset here. It's— I call it the clarity mindset, which are 5 very simple behaviors that leaders can practice that help them create clarity throughout their organizations. So, that clarity mindset was kind of the key element. And now, I'm focused on helping people leverage this clarity mindset in their organizations. It applies to just about everything. And when people apply that clarity mindset throughout their organizations, they'll see what I call the clarity cascade, which is the resulting multiplier of value that they get when their teams are working with clear purpose.

So, can you just briefly outline for us what those 5 clarity mindsets are?

Yeah, yeah. So, the 5 behaviors in the clarity mindset, first one is, you've heard me mention it, it's establishing purpose, right? So, making sure there's a clear purpose behind the work. The second behavior is visualizing connections. So, you know, I think it's really important that we're not just communicating to folks in a kind of rote format or giving people lists of things, showing the connections of their work to stakeholders, customers, other people within their company is really helpful for clarifying that original purpose that was stated. The third key principle is around acknowledging uncertainty. So, I work, spend most of my time in product development, and there is a huge amount of uncertainty there, right? We're trying to predict the future of when a product is going to be finished and how much the customers will like it. And how much it will cost. That uncertainty needs to be acknowledged in order for teams to mitigate risks, for teams to plan ahead if things change or assumptions change. The 4th behavior is optimizing value, and that's where you take the purpose, establish some clear criteria for success, and then given those uncertainties, you find or you make the trade-offs. give you the best possible outcome. I differentiate that optimizing value from, let's say, maximizing value. If I'm entering the lottery, right, I might be trying to maximize value and get really lucky, right? But optimizing value takes into consideration the risk that you have. And so if you're going to invest your money, it'd be better to invest it in a more traditional investment than something like the lottery. the lottery. And then the last practice is about promoting clarity, helping taking all the results of those 4 previous behaviors and then sharing it with other leaders, sharing it down throughout the organization, sharing it across the organization with peers to make sure that everybody can understand the context of their work and be agile and respond to change and accelerate value.

Well, thanks for sharing that. So, in your experience, in putting these 5 behaviors into place, what causes capable teams and organizations to put these into place so that they can actually avoid mediocrity and they can shift to a much more productive Yeah.

So, I think there are a few key things. First of all, the leaders have to play a big role, right? So, if the leader is not setting the right tone at the top around the importance of clarity, around the importance of purpose and acknowledging uncertainty, then they're not going to get that from the rest of their teams. So, you know, when I was able to lead with those behaviors, we were able to create dramatic results. If you just implement the clarity mindset, let's say, on one work stream within your organization, perhaps it's some process, you might get a 10%, 20% type of benefit from that, which is great. But if you apply the clarity mindset throughout your organization, you will start to see 2x, 3x, 4x multipliers on how much value that team can create. And that's what I was able to demonstrate at that company called Transition Networks. We had a very Small agile team, but by connecting all the dots for everyone, we were able to dramatically improve the return on investment. The new product revenue went up by a factor of 3.5 in 3 years. And then that continued to about 9x over another couple more years. So, it's pretty dramatic.

Yeah, for sure. So, how were you actually able to assess the effectiveness Of this? I mean, correlation is not causation. So how did you arrive at the evidence that it was this Clarity Formula that was making the difference?

Yeah, that's a great question. Working in Six Sigma, we often talk about the difference between correlation and causation. And, you know, what I would say is it's just repeated examples of how this works, right? So, many organizations can be struggling with executing and performance. Programs are delayed, program scope is confusing, budgets increase, cycle times increase. And by applying this in multiple industries, in multiple organizations, I have strong evidence to show that it works. Nothing is absolute, but I think the evidence is very strong. Given the number of examples that I've seen?

Well, in conjunction with performing the clarity and arriving at purpose and visualizing connections and acknowledging uncertainty and then optimizing value and then promoting clarity throughout the organization, there's always going to be mishaps like you just mentioned.

Yeah.

So there's constantly a need for decision-making, and certainly the leadership is the one who is— they're certainly not the only ones making decisions within this framework, but they are leading all of that decision-making. So what have you learned about how it is that decisions get stuck, and what practices generally accelerate good decision-making without forgetting the purpose, without departing from the clarity, and without sacrificing quality and trust?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. So, one of the areas that I focus on in the book and that I focused on in my career is called trade-off decision-making. And I found that to be the most successful when teams are— or let's say the analyst who's trying to develop the recommendation actually gets a good set of criteria from the organization. Oftentimes, in larger companies and even small companies, teams will make decisions based on a siloed set of criteria. perhaps what might be best for that team, as opposed to what might be best for the company as a whole. So, by using the clarity mindset, teams are encouraged to think about how their work connects to others and get a broader set of enterprise criteria for making better decisions. So, criteria is one of the key things. Establishing the timeliness is also important. So, for example, sometimes Companies will tend to kick a decision down the road, right? Because decisions are hard. It means they're sacrificing something, and no one likes to give up anything. But if you can establish a reason for why that decision needs to be made sooner rather than later, you can often, again, provide purpose to the decision and encourage those decision makers to act and then steer the organization in the correct direction. The other thing that I think can sometimes also be a challenge is not knowing who the decision maker is. So depending on the size of the organization, the larger ones have a harder challenge with this. And negotiating that upfront before you get into the thick of that recommendation is very important because when you are analyzing a trade-off decision, you have to analyze that decision relative to the decision maker's value system, right? So, you are analyzing a decision on behalf of that person. And oftentimes, teams will neglect that fact, and they will, you know, analyze it relative to their own value system, which might not be the best for the company. So, those are some keys to helping to accelerate decision-making and making sure that it's done in a way that improves the value for the company.

Well, As you zoom out beyond methods and frameworks, what do you hope that people take from your work at a human level?

Yeah, you know, when I wrote the book, I was very surprised at some of the human reactions that people gave to me. They were writing, you know, hey, can we use this in our daily life? You know, and I was like, of course, you know, it helps bring some clarity to what you're trying to do. With your own personal mission statement and your own personal vision statement. What I would say is we've talked about maybe some more complex and in-depth topics here, but the framework is very simple. And what I found is that people can leverage the clarity of mindset the day after they use it, right? They might find something simple that when they're having meetings, instead of showing just a dashboard of what's happening, they might add a statement at the bottom of the dashboard that says, you know, this is why this is important for our customers. And bringing that, centering the team on that with that simple statement can really help, just in a matter of 24 hours, make teams start to make better decisions.

So, I'm thinking from my own perspective there, I can think very globally and leave people behind? Because I get the picture, but oftentimes, people are looking for specifics, and I find it difficult to bring those specifics home. So, what kind of advice do you have for me?

Yeah. So, there's a couple of things I would say to that. We've all probably worked with teams that require different levels of Instruction, right? And some teams are really good at, hey, if you give them the purpose and the criteria, they can go out and figure out whatever work it will take to accomplish the task. And then there are other teams which need the specific instructions, no matter how much you tell them about the purpose, they really want and crave for specific instructions. So, there are 2 things I would say to that. First is situational leadership, right? Just being aware of what type of team or person you are working with and what they need to be successful. But then 2, considering that second team, which needs more of that, you know, rote instruction, consider that as a development opportunity for that team. Try and get them to think more broadly and seek out the connections between their work and the purpose behind their work with the practice of visualizing connections. That over time will help them understand and get the perspective of their work relative to other activities within the company. And then, you know, should help them grow to be more independent and able to see the purpose behind their work.

This might be too specific a question, but do you have any exercises for helping people to visualize connections?

Yeah, well, so I do actually have— I've taken the book and I've tried to create some methods for operationalizing it. So I have a small exercise called the Clarity Canvas, which guides people through the 4 practices in a fairly short session. It's about a 20 to 30 minute session. Because it's really pretty easy, right? You— once you identify the ambiguity, which we— is really the first step, applying those principles can be very simple. You might have action items to follow up on, but it just really helps you identify the questions that you need answers to and gets you moving in the right direction. And so, I call it the Clarity Canvas, and it's about a 20 to 30-minute exercise.

Well, in closing, when you look back on your career, what do you most want to have helped people reclaim about themselves, their work, or their sense of purpose in an uncertain world?

Yeah, I love that question. You know, it's surprising that it took me late into my career to really understand my purpose, right? And I feel like I have a very strong connection To accelerating value from product development. And I was really focused on this mission statement that I had, which was around accelerating that value, helping teams create value faster, whatever industry it's in, for the betterment of humanity. That's what's great about engineering. But I was able to ladder that up recently. And for me, it's around my vision statement, which is enabling human potential, right, to maximize what they can contribute in their engineering discipline and in their product development disciplines. That, to me, has been the best part of the work, you know, the work I've done in the last, you know, 5 years to put the book together and understand my role in in the engineering space. So that's what I would say.

Well, Tom, thank you so much for being with us today. So in today's conversation, we're reminded that progress, especially in uncertain times, is rarely about moving faster for its own sake. It's about clarity before speed, intention before execution, and designing systems, decisions, and lives that can hold complexity Without collapsing into reactivity. So we explored how clarity and purpose are not abstract ideals, but practical forces that unlock human potential, accelerate decision-making, and transform mediocrity into meaningful progress. At the heart of it all was a deeply human insight: when people are aligned internally, value creation follows. Naturally and sustainably. Our guest shared a perspective shaped by decades of scientific rigor, leadership experience, and thoughtful reflection. Tom's work consistently points back to a simple truth: breakthrough performance does not begin with tools or frameworks, but with how clearly people understand what really matters and why. So, if today's conversation resonated with you, I encourage you to explore Tom's book, The Clarity Cascade: Unleashing Hidden Value to Accelerate Product Development and Multiply ROI. And it's available through your local bookstores and online booksellers. And it offers a practical and grounded guide to unlocking hidden value through clarity-driven leadership and design. And before we close, I want to remind you of the gift I mentioned at the beginning of today's episode. Beyond the Paycheck is the Financial Clarity Compass, an instructional masterclass that I created to help high-achieving professionals step back, gain perspective, and begin aligning their work, capital, and purpose with long-term impact. You can claim your free access to this gift at www.goclearitycompass.com. Thank you for joining me on Streams to Impact. Until next time, remember, progress that endures is never accidental. It is designed with intention.

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