Three years before taking over as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kevin M. Warsh recounted an exchange he once had with a hero of his, Paul A. Volcker, the celebrated central banker. Mr. Volcker, who navigated the Fed through one of the worst bouts of inflation in the 1970s and 1980s, told Mr. Warsh, then a governor, that the central bank’s job boiled down to two primary responsibilities.

The first was getting interest rates “about right.” The second was to “make sure you look like you know what you’re doing.”Those duties are top of mind as Mr. Warsh prepares for his first address as chairman to the world’s leading economic policymakers in Jackson, Wyo. His speech, scheduled for Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern, is the biggest draw of the three-day conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. It will offer Mr. Warsh the most powerful perch yet to articulate his own framework for thinking about the economy, the policy choices in front of the Fed as it contends with elevated inflation and how he is assessing seismic changes — such as new sources of productivity gains from artificial intelligence — that could alter the country’s growth prospects in the years ahead.

Those details have been intentionally sparse, reflecting Mr. Warsh’s inclination to guard his preferences. One of the only things that Mr. Warsh has made unequivocally clear is that he is committed to getting inflation down after five years of the central bank’s overshooting its 2 percent target. And even then, he has spoken only obliquely about the possibility of raising rates to get there.

The lack of specifics on where Mr. Warsh stands on a number of fundamental issues has caused confusion both inside and outside the Fed, overshadowing his broader ambitions to enact sweeping change at the institution. Resolving this does not require Mr. Warsh to provide specific guidance about the Fed’s policy moves in September and beyond, as he is staunchly opposed to doing. But a slight change of tack is required to begin to reset the narrative after a rocky start. “You won’t accomplish anything if you are unwilling to tell people how you think the economy works,” said Anil Kashyap, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. “You have to have a mechanism that you think explains why if you’re going to do something differently, it’s going to turn out better.

And that means you need to pick a lane on various issues.” “The honeymoon’s over,” Mr. Kashyap added. Going into this year’s conference, Mr. Warsh seemed inclined to give what he described last month as a “big-picture speech” that would tackle structural shifts afoot that could alter how the Fed sets policy in three or four years’ time. Such an approach would have aligned with Mr. Warsh’s frequent criticism that officials often get “caught up in the myopic” of near-term rate decisions, putting too much emphasis on monthly fluctuations in economic data that is often subject to large revisions.

It would have also placed at the forefront the work of the five task forces that he convened to look into a range of issues, from how the Fed communicates to the optimal size of its balance sheet. Mr. Warsh will no doubt highlight on Friday the ongoing efforts of these task forces, whose work is set to wrap up by the end of the year. But the current backdrop demands some commentary on the present, said Richard Clarida, a former Fed vice chair now at PIMCO. “Monetary policy is also about the here and now,” he said. The “here and now” for Mr. Warsh has become much more complicated in recent weeks.

Long-term U.S. borrowing costs have surged to multidecade highs, prompting surprise interventions from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to stem the rout. Traders are now testing Mr. Bessent’s resolve, leaving markets on the whole more jittery. At the most basic level, Mr. Bessent has raised the stakes for Mr. Warsh this week, according to Michael Strain, an economist at the conserv...