Throughout my career, I have observed that different people are often attentive to and focused on different levels of conceptual refinement. These perspectives vary according to their roles on a project, their individual personalities, and their experience. I have tended to mentally categorize these individuals into one of two different types of individuals at the top and bottom of this granularity perception universe: a "Roughly right" personality type, and a "Precisely right" type.

If you are a Precisely Right person, and are making an oral presentation to an audience primarily composed of Roughly Right people, it is easy to fail to communicate with them. You may spend the majority of your presentation covering a lot of details, since that is the language you are used to using. If you do this, you are likely to lose the Roughly Right people in your audience in these details, or trigger an impatient demand from them to get to the point. Yet if you instead are pitching to Precisely Right types, and don't provide them with such details, you may find yourself unable to engage with them or obtain commitments from them to support your ideas or plans. Without such details, Precisely Right people may not understand high-level ideas or notional concepts, and you may struggle to obtain commitments from them without these details.

Roughly Right people tend to be first movers and starters. In this role, they will often lose interest in projects before such details are defined. In contrast, Precisely Right people are often finishers, the unspoken heroes who have to save projects that were build on good intentions but flawed assumptions.

As John Sterman indicates, the uncertainties and instability that results from ambiguous information sources must be reconciled before decision-making on projects will be effective: 

Successful projects must thus provide a reliable means of engaging with both Roughly Right and Precisely Right people. Leaders must achieve the collective buy-in from both types in order to resolve this ambiguity at an appropriate level of detail. Ideally, requirements provide a solid foundation for shaping and evolving high-level concepts and incorporating the necessary design details coherently and comprehensively. Translating and refining such information requires persistence, discipline, time, energy, resources, and sufficient attention so the right details to be elaborated. Otherwise, you'll find the path to solutions will likely be dominated by change and rework as the project unfolds over time, and this typically results in projects which never seem to finish.

During the reconciliation of needed details, inevitably, gaps of knowledge and interpretation will arise. The the ability to effectively extract the right details for each particular circumstance will be crucial to making sure these gaps are closed. This is a challenge to achieve consistently. One of the underlying causes of this is that it is easy to assume that everyone shares a cognitive framework that understanding and meaning can be based upon. Too often, the hard work to establish this framework is often overlooked. As Fred Brooks describes:

You can't expect Roughly Right people to be able to provide all of the details needed by Precisely Right people. But until the stakeholders that need these details have them, you also can't expect that to have sufficient control of the critical factors over what it will take to deliver on a requested, but not yet well understood, requirement.

The way forward requires Roughly Right people to acknowledge there are such gaps, even though they rarely are the ones who will have the persistence or discipline to close them. Precisely Right people must learn to communicate what kinds of gaps exist in order for the work which they must do to be actionable. Trust is built if everyone can agree that finding the collective way through such clouds of ambiguity is more like hacking through a jungle than it is following a GPS. Key to making this progress is the ability to sift through extensive information from many problem domains, and summarize it in a compact and coherent presentation so that relevant decisions can be accomplished.

Leaders (often roughly right people) must commit to projects before all of these details are fully defined. Those responsible for deciphering and implementing their intentions (ideally, precisely right people) must assure that such commitments have access to sufficient contingent resources so these project commitments can be achieved, despite the uncertainties of this direction.  As a result, both types need each other, but must learn to work together effectively, given their shared destiny.