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Why clarity beats guesswork for people and AI
By Bethany Fishbein, OD
May 7, 2026
I recently attended the Running Remote conference in Austin, Texas, and I found it to be one of the most energizing professional experiences I’ve had in a long time. I love a good optometric conference, but there is something genuinely different about sitting in a room full of non-optometric entrepreneurs and business thinkers who are talking about leadership, culture and the future of how we work.
My Takeaways
The conference was focused primarily on building and leading remote teams—the benefits of access to talent unlimited by geography, how to create culture when you’re not sharing physical space and how to keep people connected and moving in the same direction when you’re not all in the same room. Woven throughout all of it was the theme of AI—how artificial intelligence is changing the way people and teams work and what leaders need to do to use it well.
AI was frequently talked about as another team member, assisting a company executive or in some cases even working independently (?!) on behalf of the business. These business leaders weren’t talking about remote employees or AI agents doing repetitive busy work. They were talking about people and AI serving at high levels with some decision-making capacity. Which seems shocking, until you think about what a business owner could do if their to-do list was suddenly completed and they could spend the majority of time actually building their business.
I came home with my head swimming with ideas: some for my consulting work, some for my clients and some for my own optometric practices.
One common thread though is the idea that whether we’re talking about remote employees, in-person team or even an AI agent or program, everything works better when you’ve clearly defined exactly who you are and where you’re going and how decisions are made in your business.
In most optometric practices (including mine, if I’m being fully honest here), this isn’t defined clearly enough.
Everyone Is Guessing
Most practice owners know they should have a clear mission and vision—and either don’t or have something so generic it doesn’t actually guide anything. Some can give me a passionate detailed answer when I ask—but when I talk to their teams, the teams don’t know it.
Either way, the people who are doing the work every day are making their best guesses about what good looks like, what matters most and what decisions to make when things aren’t clear. Sometimes they guess right. Sometimes they don’t. And the practice owner wonders why sometimes the team “just doesn’t get it.”
They’re not getting it because they’re not smart or they’re not trying. In most cases, it’s because they’ve never been told clearly what “getting it” should look like.
The AI Connection
Artificial intelligence makes the point even more vivid. If you’ve used ChatGPT or any other AI tool for drafting emails, creating blog content, writing a letter or handling a patient or staff situation, you’re probably well aware that the quality of what you get out is directly related to the quality of what you put in. Ask a vague general question with no history or context, and you’ll get a generic answer or a list of options. If you give clear context—who you are, what your tone and values are, who you’re talking to and what you’re trying to accomplish—you will get a much clearer usable answer.
One of my big takeaways from Running Remote was the idea of a “company context document.” This is a clear, written description of who you are and who your company is, what it stands for, how it operates and where it’s going. It was suggested that you create this document first, to feed to your AI tools before you start using them. This would allow them to actually work in alignment with your business to produce content that actually sounds like you, make suggestions that actually fit your practice and help you move in the direction you’re actually trying to go. Without it, it’s just guessing.
And for what it’s worth, your human team works exactly the same way.
Whether your staff members are across the room or across the world, they are also working with whatever context they have available. If the information is rich and clear, they can make good decisions and represent your practice well. They can move things forward without needing you to weigh in on every decision. If the information is lacking, they will fill in the gaps with “best guesses” which may or may not align with what you want.
What “Clear” Actually Looks Like
So what does it really mean to get clear? In practice ownership, I think it comes down to a few essential things.
Who you are and what you stand for: This is your mission, your values and your identity as a practice. Not generic “excellence in eye care” but the specific version. What are your personal beliefs about what makes patient care excellent? Also, what are your nonnegotiables in how patients are treated? What does a great visit in your office look and feel like? What would make you cringe if you saw it happening?
Where you’re going: What are you building? Not this month or this year, but the bigger picture. Are you growing toward multiple locations? Deepening into a specialty? Aiming to get off insurance plans? Building something to sell? Building something that can run independently and let you step back? Your team makes micro-decisions every day that either support your vision or work against it. They can’t make the right ones if they don’t know what you’re aiming for.
How decisions are made: What are the principles that guide choices in your practice when things aren’t black and white? What, besides skills and experience, makes an applicant a good fit for your office? When a patient is upset, what’s the instinct you want your team to lead with? When there’s a conflict between patient experience and financial gain, where do you land? Defining these guardrails explicitly lets people act with confidence instead of second-guessing themselves or defaulting to asking you.
This doesn’t need to be a 40-page document or a framed fancy-font statement framed on your wall. It just needs to exist somewhere outside of your head, easily accessible to you and your team, in language clear enough that someone who didn’t already know you could understand it.
Inspired by the conference, I’m working on leveling up my own AI skills by building a tool to help practice owners build their own context document. Check back with me in a few weeks. I’ll either have something worthwhile to share or a very humbling follow-up article.
The Same Rules Apply
Whether onsite or overseas, human or AI, the team working on things in your business all have something fundamental in common. They will be able to do their best work when they have clear context to work from and will default to guessing when they don’t.
The leaders who get the most out of their people and their technology are the ones who will do the work to get clear and then do the harder work of actually communicating that to the people around them.
Your team wants to get it right. So does your AI for that matter. They just need you to tell them what “right” looks like.
Read more insights from Dr. Fishbein here.
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Bethany Fishbein, OD, is a practice owner, practice management consultant and certified executive coach. She can be reached at bethany@leadersofvision.com |
