More Messages, Less Clarity

I pride myself on clear communication. No unnecessary jargon, vocabulary calibrated to the audience, acronyms always spelled out. It's something I've been deliberate about for years — because I've seen what happens when people don't bother.

So it was particularly humbling when a client, onboarding a new team member, pointed to something on the calendar and said: "And here's when we do UAT." The new team member asked what UAT stood for. My client paused and said, genuinely, "I actually don't know — but it's when we do testing."

I had never once explained that UAT meant user acceptance testing. Not once, in the entire engagement. I'd been so focused on whether the testing was happening that I'd never stopped to ask whether everyone in the room understood what we were even calling it.

Clear communication for the fail.

That moment sticks with me not because it caused a catastrophe — it didn't — but because of what it showed. Communication failures on events rarely announce themselves. They accumulate as:

an undefined term that nobody questions
an assumption about who's responsible for a handoff that turns out to be wrong
a message sent through the wrong channel to someone who didn’t see it in time to act

And by the time those gaps become obvious, you're usually too far into delivery to do anything about it.

A familiar paradox

These communications patterns run deeper than missed messages or undefined acronyms.

Event delivery is cross-functional by nature — marketing, operations, technology, external vendors, speakers, sponsors, and leadership all touching the same program with different contexts, different tools, and different assumptions about what "aligned" actually means. In that environment, communication that isn't deliberately designed tends to default to habit: whoever sends the most messages, uses the most familiar channel, or follows up most aggressively ends up driving the information flow, regardless of whether that's actually serving the people who need to act on it.

The result is familiar to all of us: teams that are in constant communication and still find themselves misaligned at the moments that matter.

Signage deadlines missed despite multiple reminders
Assets that didn't arrive on time because the request got buried in a channel nobody actively monitors
A run of show that five people reviewed but nobody formally approved

These failures are rarely about effort or intention. They're almost always about structure — specifically, the absence of it. When teams haven't established which channel carries which kind of information, what response time is expected where, or who owns a given communication stream, the default is whatever feels most urgent in the moment. Which means the same message might exist simultaneously in Slack, email, a project management tool, and a text thread, with no clear owner and no reliable way to know who's actually seen it.

Communication as a design problem

This is a solvable problem, but it requires treating communication as a design challenge rather than a behavioral one.

The question isn't "why don't people communicate better?"
It's "what does the system need to look like for the right information to reliably reach the right people in time to change a decision?"

In practice, that means explicit channel norms — agreements about what each tool is for, what response time it implies, and what kinds of decisions it can carry. One team I worked with established simply that Slack was same-day, email was 24 hours, and anything urgent went to a phone call. That one conversation eliminated days of lag. Not because it was complicated, but because it made an unspoken assumption visible.

It also means right-sizing information to the audience — not every stakeholder needs the same level of detail, and sending a full technical rundown to someone who needs a single decision made is its own form of communication failure. It also means building in confirmation loops, because in complex, fast-moving programs, "I sent it" and "they received it" are not the same thing.

The behavioral science of how people process information is also worth understanding: clarity isn't just about content, it's about context, cognitive load, and whether the recipient has what they need to actually act. Teams that understand this build communication systems accordingly — they don't just send clearer messages, they create the conditions where clarity is more likely to occur.

Clear communication is the second dimension of the ACCORD framework because misalignment at this layer compounds everything downstream. Goals that were well-defined in kickoff become lost and diluted by week six if there's no shared language or reliable information flow. Collaboration breaks down when people are operating on different versions of the same decision. Technology gets configured around requirements that were never actually confirmed.

Getting this right doesn't require more communication. It requires more intentional communication — designed around the people who need to act on it, not the habits of the people producing it.

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