What is role clarity?

Role clarity is a concept in personal epistemology: Defining roles for people and objects clarifies what each is responsible for.

Example: Your team has five people on a product launch. Everyone is 'helping.' The launch slips a week because nobody knew who owned the go/no-go decision, who was supposed to brief legal, or who had final say on the pricing page copy. Now assign explicit role types — one DRI for the launch decision, one Responsible for legal review, two Consulted on pricing, one Informed on timeline changes. Same five people, but every relationship is suddenly legible. The role types didn't add bureaucracy. They removed the invisible tax of guessing.

This concept is part of Phase 12 (Classification and Typing) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for classification and typing.