Book excerpt: Confusion is more than just another daily inconvenience, though its impacts are often hidden in metrics such as market share, productivity, and ROI. This book shows how to identify and eliminate the Cost of Confusion in workplaces, marketplaces, and communities. Cutting that cost demands the ability to distill, integrate, and synthesize ever more complex information from a broad range of perspectives and disciplines. Any gaps in understanding can and do negatively impact performance. Based on Richard Layton’s 20 years of experience helping organizations to be heard and understood, this book offers a powerful universal lens to view the costly impacts of confusion, and provides a framework to identify and manage the risk of failure to communicate with a range of stakeholders and audiences – and save millions of dollars in the process. Decision-makers, practitioners, and students in marketing and advertising, organizational development, knowledge management, information technology, project management, and other fields will appreciate this unique set of insights and tools they can employ to great effect within their companies, organizations, and public institutions.