Available November 13, 2025

Episode 006: The Communication Paradox: When More Words Create Less Understanding

DURATION: 34 minutes
HOST: Kevin Novak
SHOW: The Human Factor Podcast

Kevin: A CEO stands in front of 300 employees at the quarterly all-hands meeting. She’s been preparing for weeks. Comprehensive slide deck. Detailed talking points. Supporting documentation sent in advance. Follow-up emails scheduled with frequently asked questions, and a template toolkit for team and department communications.

She finishes her 45-minute presentation feeling confident. Clear. Thorough. She covered everything.

Two weeks later, the employee survey results come back. The number one comment: “We don’t understand the direction of the organization.”

She communicated more. They understood less.

This is the communication paradox. And it challenges every executive, supervisor, team-leader and manager in organizations.

Today we’re exploring one of the most counterintuitive problems in organizational management and change: why more communication often creates less understanding, and what leaders can do about it.

I’m Kevin Novak, CEO of 2040 Digital, Professor at the University of Maryland and author of The Truth About Transformation and the Ideas and Innovations weekly newsletter.

Welcome to The Human Factor Podcast. The show that explores the intersection of humanity, technology, and transformation and the psychology behind transformation success.

Kevin: Through my work with clients over the last decade, I’ve seen brilliant communication strategies fail not because they lacked thoroughness, but because organizations confused volume with clarity.

Communication is the most frequently cited problem in employee surveys. Every organization says they need to “communicate better.”

So they communicate more. More meetings. More emails. More town halls. More updates. More cascading messages. More slack and teams posts.

And somehow, understanding actually decreases.

This isn’t just frustrating. It’s expensive.

According to research from the Project Management Institute, poor communication is the primary contributor to project failure one-third of the time.

Poor communication plays a role in 56% of failed projects.

When we’re talking about change and transformation initiatives with budgets in the millions or hundreds of millions, this communication failure has massive financial consequences.

But here’s what most leaders miss. The problem isn’t that organizations aren’t communicating enough. The problem is they’re communicating in the wrong ways. More volume doesn’t create more clarity. In fact, it often does the opposite.

Today, we’re going to explore the psychology behind the communication paradox,

examine why our instinct to communicate more backfires,

help create understanding of what people actually need to hear,

and most importantly,

I will detail a framework for achieving actual clarity in change, transformation and really any messaging in the organizational setting.

This connects directly to research I detail in my book The Truth About Transformation. Organizations invest billions in change initiatives, yet most fail because they focus on technology and process while ignoring the human psychological factors that actually determines success. The communication paradox is a perfect example of this pattern.

SEGMENT 1: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INFORMATION OVERLOAD

Kevin: Let’s start with what happens in the human brain when we receive too much information.

In Episode 004, Elizabeth Stewart and I explored how the human brain can consciously process only about 126 bits of information per second, and understanding one person speaking requires about 60 bits.

So what happens when organizational communicators ignore this cognitive reality and flood people with comprehensive communications that exceed processing capacity?

We all are barraged day to day with near constant communication: emails, notifications, texts, collaboration platform messages, dives into social media feeds, your brain lives in cognitive overload as it tries to constantly filter and decide what deserves conscious attention and what to ignore. In that deluge, there is much the mind doesn’t even take in, understand or even bother to compute.

This is why you can drive home from work, or run an errand, and not remember the journey. Your brain processed bit upon bit of data about traffic, road conditions, and navigation, but none of it required conscious attention because it was routine or you were distracted by other thoughts.

Now apply this to organizational communication. When leaders, the CEO, your supervisor, or a project manager sends comprehensive updates about new initiatives, their brain has already done the filtering. They believe they know what’s important. They have chosen the words to include, the words to omit as well as facts or figures. They’ve decided what deserves attention and left out what they considered un-necessary. But when employees receive the communication and the information it contains, their brains start filter and interpret from scratch.

And here’s the critical part. When faced with too much information, the brain doesn’t just process it all slowly. It shuts down. It goes into what researchers call cognitive overload. The person stops processing entirely.

This is backed by solid research. A study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology found that when people are presented with too many options or too much information, they don’t carefully evaluate everything. I wrote about this over several issues of my newsletter, seeking to help readers understand why they feel stress and anxiety when presented with too much choice.

Mostly every individual either makes random choices or avoids deciding altogether. Simply trying to contend with overload and return to some semblance of comfort and calm.

This is called the paradox of choice, and it applies to information just as much as it applies to product selection.

This builds on what we covered a few weeks ago when discussing decision paralysis. Just as too much data creates analysis paralysis in decision-making, too much communication creates comprehension paralysis in change adoption. Both stem from the same cognitive limitation.

In transformation contexts, cognitive overload manifests in very specific ways. People stop reading emails beyond the first paragraph. They tune out during presentations. They nod along in meetings while actually planning their grocery lists. They say “yes, I understand” when they absolutely don’t, just to end the conversation and escape the information flood.

Leaders interpret this as engagement. “Everyone was nodding. The message landed.” But it didn’t. The nodding was a survival mechanism to stop the information assault. People played along, with their body cues, facial expressions to convey affirmation to the leader, as they played social organizational politics.

There’s another psychological phenomenon at play here called the illusion of explanatory depth. When people hear complex information explained thoroughly, they develop a false sense of understanding. They think they understand because they heard a lot of words and it seemed comprehensive. Seemed true and well-defended. But if you asked them to explain it back, they often wouldn’t even know where to start.

This is why immediate post-training surveys show high satisfaction and communicated knowledge retention, but actual behavior change and long term retention is minimal. People feel like they learned something. But feeling like you learned, knowing and understanding what you learned, applying it in practice, and actually integrating knowledge into behavior are completely different things.

The neuroscience here is so interesting. When you learn something new, you’re creating new neural connections. But behavior change requires something much harder. It requires overriding existing neural pathways, the automatic responses your brain has developed over years or decades. No amount of information changes those pathways. Only repeated practice and experience does. This connects directly to Episode 005, where we discussed how behavior change requires overriding existing neural pathways through practice, not just receiving information. Communication volume doesn’t create new pathways. It creates cognitive overload that prevents pathway formation entirely.

So when organizations respond to low adoption rates by communicating more, explaining more thoroughly, providing more documentation, they’re actually making the problem worse. They start throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. They’re adding information without creating the conditions for understanding, assimilation of the information to in the immediate or over time generate behavioral change.

Let me share a real example. I worked with a healthcare organization implementing a new electronic health records system. Leadership created what they proudly called a “comprehensive communication strategy.” Weekly system updates. Detailed feature explanations. Training videos. FAQs. Job aids. Reference guides. They checked all the boxes on the task list. The consultants had given them a rock-solid project and action plan so they felt all they needed to do what complete the tasks, check the boxes, and success would come.

Six months in, system adoption across the organization was terrible. Leadership’s response was predictable. They communicated even more. They created role-specific communications. They added weekly team and department forums. They built video-based explainer series to detail the new system benefits.

Usage actually decreased as individuals sought work-arounds to get their day to day work completed.

When we conducted psychological readiness interviews, clinicians told us something revealing. They weren’t lacking information. They were drowning in it. They had stopped trying to keep up. The sheer volume of communication made them feel like this system must be incredibly complicated, which increased their anxiety and resistance. They feared diving in below the surface.

The solution wasn’t more communication. It was radically less.

SEGMENT 2: THE CLARITY ILLUSION

Kevin: Here’s where the communication paradox becomes the elephant in the room. Leaders experience what researchers call the curse of knowledge. Once you understand something deeply, it becomes almost impossible to remember what it’s like not to understand it.

This is a well-documented cognitive bias studied extensively by behavioral economists. When you’re an expert on a topic, you can’t mentally simulate the perspective of a novice. You know too much, you already processed the “facts” over time. You assume things are obvious that absolutely aren’t obvious to anyone but yourself. You skip steps in explanations because those steps feel basic to you. Like “duh”, everyone will get this. You use jargon without realizing it’s jargon because your mind has created new pathways to describe something as basic, because, well its now common knowledge to you.

In change and transformation contexts, leadership teams spend months planning the change. Secret meetings, conferring with tech teams, human resources, board members, email back and forth. They debate strategies. They analyze data. They consider scenarios. By the time they’re ready to communicate to the organization, they’ve thought about the change or transformation from every angle. The decision and path forward make perfect sense to them.

Then they stand in front of employees who are hearing about it for the first time and assume two hours of presentation will bring everyone to the same level of understanding they reached after six months of deep thinking.

It won’t. It can’t. There may be a few who “get it” most won’t.

But leaders don’t realize this because they’re experiencing the clarity illusion. They think they’ve been clear because the message is clear in their own minds. They created comprehensive documentation because more detail feels more thorough, more professional, more complete.

Meanwhile, employees are experiencing cognitive overload, confusion and do not know how to even get to a point of clarity.

Returning to the healthcare example, we asked leadership to pause their checklist-driven communication approach. Through strategic questioning, we challenged their assumptions about what clinicians actually needed to hear.

Through this effort, we got the leadership to identify the one essential message that needed to land. Not ten messages they had been communicating. One. The new system would save clinicians an average of 45 minutes per day through automated documentation. That was it. Ensuring the communication focused on the benefits employees would experience. Setting a positive, correlated, productive message that would resonate more than any other.

Everything else, offered for further reading was supporting detail. Reframed.

What they actually wanted to communicate was System architecture. Integration specifications. Compliance requirements. Training schedules. Implementation phases. Change management protocols and stakeholder engagement plans.

Forty-five minutes saved per day got buried under mountains of information that clinicians didn’t need and wouldn’t remember.

When we helped them strip the message down to its essence, use of the new system jumped 47% in 30 days. Not because we added information. Because we removed it.

This connects to something researchers call the curse of dimensionality in information theory. As you add dimensions to information, the volume of space increases exponentially, but the useful information becomes increasingly sparse. In simple terms, more words often create more confusion, not more understanding.

Think about the difference between a GPS giving you turn-by-turn directions versus someone giving you a comprehensive explanation of the entire route before you start driving. The comprehensive explanation feels more thorough. But the simple, just-in-time guidance is infinitely more useful.

Most change and transformation communication is like the comprehensive route explanation. It feels professional. It feels complete. But it doesn’t help people actually do the thing they need to do.

Let me share another pattern I see repeatedly. Organizations create detailed business cases explaining why change and transformation is necessary. Market analysis. Competitive threats. Revenue projections. Strategic imperatives. They present this to employees expecting it will create buy-in.

It doesn’t. Because employees aren’t asking “Why is this good for the business?” They’re asking “Why is this good for me? What problem does this solve in my daily work?”

Those are fundamentally different questions requiring completely different communication approaches and those questions are what I explained along with the stages of change and transformation grief that results in Episode 5.

SEGMENT 3: WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY NEED

Kevin: So if more communication doesn’t work, what does? Let’s talk about what people actually need to understand during organizational change, transformation and really any initiatives, routine updates or conveying of information that requires communication.

Research from the field of implementation science gives us clear answers here. When people face organizational change, they need to understand three things. Not thirty things. Three.

First, they need to understand why this change is happening. Not the business case. Not the ROI analysis. Not the competitive landscape assessment. They need to understand the problem that this change solves for them personally. What are the benefits that will experience.

Notice the difference. Most change communication focuses on organizational why. “We need to remain competitive.” “The market is shifting.” “Our strategy requires this.” This is leadership perspective. It means nothing to someone doing their actual job every day.

People need the personal why. “Your current process takes four hours and creates frustration. This new approach takes 30 minutes and eliminates redundant work.” That’s why that matters to an individual.

Second, people need to understand what is changing and what is staying the same. This is critical and almost always skipped. When leaders announce change, employees assume everything is changing. Their roles, their relationships, their skills, their status, their security. Unless you explicitly tell them what’s staying the same, they fill that void with worst-case scenarios.

Remember from Episode 005 that unlearning old behaviors is harder than learning new ones. This is why clear communication about what’s staying the same is so critical. It reduces the cognitive load of figuring out what needs to be unlearned versus what can be preserved.

Most change communication focuses entirely on what’s new. The new system, the new process, the new structure. But psychological safety during change comes from understanding what’s stable, what’s staying the same, what anchors remain.

Third, people need to understand what they specifically need to do differently and when. Not general expectations. Specific behaviors. Not “embrace the new culture” but “starting Monday, submit time sheets through the new portal instead of email.”

That’s it. Three things. Why this matters to me personally. What’s staying the same. What I specifically do differently. And harkening to how to manage the transitions of change, recognize the curve everyone will go through leading to acceptance.

Everything else is noise.

Now, leaders often push back on this. “But what about the strategic context? What about helping people understand the bigger picture? What about building buy-in through comprehensive understanding?”

Here’s what research shows. Comprehensive understanding doesn’t create behavior change. It creates the illusion of buy-in while actual behavior remains unchanged.

Think about your own life. You probably understand comprehensively why you should exercise more, eat healthier, save more money. Has that comprehensive understanding changed your behavior? For most people, no.

Behavior change doesn’t come from comprehensive understanding. It comes from clear, specific direction about what to do differently, combined with support for actually doing it. Change, any change is hard, it breaks the routine, it rattles confidence and it also requires a break from established neural pathways.

The recognition and approaches to improve communication and understanding need to be built on the psychological reality that knowledge and behavior are different things requiring different approaches.

SEGMENT 4: THE CLARITY FRAMEWORK

Kevin: Let me give you a practical framework for achieving actual clarity in transformation communication. This applies whether you’re communicating to ten people or ten thousand.

Step One: Identify Your One Thing. Not your ten priorities. Your one essential message that must land for this change to succeed.

This is harder than it sounds because leaders want to communicate everything. But forcing yourself to identify the one thing creates the discipline necessary for clarity. If people understood only one thing about this change, what must that one thing be?

Usually, it’s the personal why. The specific problem this solves, the benefits it creates, for people doing the actual work.

Step Two: Test for the Curse of Knowledge. Before you communicate, show your message to someone completely unfamiliar with the change. Not another executive. Someone three or four levels down in the organization who hasn’t been in the endless planning meetings or email discussions.

Ask them to read it and then explain back what they understand. Not what they think you meant, but what the words actually communicated to them.

You will be shocked. Words that seem clear to you will be incomprehensible to them. Concepts that feel obvious will be confusing. Jargon you don’t even realize is jargon will stop them cold.

This reality check is essential. You cannot judge the clarity of your own communication. You’re too close to it.

Step Three: Cut By Half, Then Cut Again. Whatever message you’ve prepared, cut it by 50%. Then cut it by 50% again.

This feels wrong. It feels like you’re oversimplifying. Like you’re not being thorough enough. That feeling is the curse of knowledge talking.

Remember, you’re not trying to transfer your entire mental model to everyone else. You’re trying to help them understand enough to take the first step. That requires far less information than you think.

Step Four: Make It Repeatable. Your message should be simple enough that anyone who hears it can explain it to someone else without referring to documentation. Think about this in terms of the elevator pitch. Respect that the goal is not to cause cognitive overload, its to create understanding. This tactic is the test of genuine clarity.

If a manager can’t explain the change to their team without pulling up your PowerPoint slides, your message isn’t clear enough yet.

Think about successful product taglines. “Just Do It.” “Think Different.” “The Ultimate Driving Machine.” These are memorable and repeatable because they’re simple. Complex messages don’t spread. Simple ones do.

Step Five: Provide Just-in-Time Details. Instead of front-loading all information, create a system for providing specific guidance exactly when people need it.

This is the GPS model. You don’t need to know every turn before you start. You need to know the next turn right before you make it.

In change and transformation contexts, this means providing detailed guidance on specific tasks at the moment people need to perform those tasks. Not comprehensive training up front, but targeted support throughout the journey.

This dramatically reduces cognitive load while increasing actual competence.

Let’s make this concrete with a before and after example.

Before: “As part of our digital transformation initiative aligned with our 2025 strategic objectives, we’re implementing a new enterprise resource planning system that will integrate our supply chain, finance, and customer relationship management functions into a unified platform enabling real-time data visibility and cross-functional collaboration while optimizing operational efficiency and positioning us for scalable growth in an increasingly competitive market landscape.”

After: “Starting next month, you’ll use one system instead of three. Same information, fewer logins, faster access.”

Notice what got cut. Strategic objectives. Buzzwords. Benefits that matter to executives but not to daily work. What remained: What’s changing, when, and what it means for me specifically.

Ensure there is an offer to further detail and information, for those ready to dive in.

The first version sounds more professional. More comprehensive. More executive-appropriate. It’s also completely ineffective at creating understanding or driving behavior change.

The second version sounds almost too simple. Leaders worry it’s not thorough enough. But it actually communicates. People understand it. They can repeat it. They can act on it.

Here’s the psychological reality. Humans can only process and act on simple messages. When we receive complex information, we either tune out or we distill it down to something simple anyway. But when we do that distilling ourselves, we often get it wrong.

Far better for leadership to do the hard work of distilling the message to its essence and communicating that essence clearly than to dump complex information on people and hope they distill it correctly themselves.

This is what we mean by leaders doing the thinking so employees can do the doing. Not because employees aren’t smart enough to think. But because cognitive load is real, and every bit of mental energy spent trying to understand the change is energy not spent actually changing.

PRACTICAL TAKEAWAYS

Kevin: Let’s bring this back to where we started. The communication paradox. More words creating less understanding.

The solution isn’t to communicate less frequently. Communication frequency matters. Regular updates create psychological safety. But volume and frequency are different things.

The solution is to communicate more frequently with dramatically less content. Simple messages, repeated often, in multiple formats.

One message. Repeated ten times in ten different ways. That’s more effective than ten messages communicated once each.

Think about successful political campaigns. They don’t communicate ten policy positions. They communicate one or two key messages repeatedly throughout the entire campaign. Simple messages that anyone can understand and repeat.

Most transformation leaders do the opposite. They communicate ten messages once each and wonder why nothing sticks.

If you’re leading change and transformation and struggling with communication, here’s your homework. Identify your one thing. The one message that must land. Then communicate only that message for the next two weeks. Say it in emails. Say it in meetings. Say it in hallway conversations. Say it everywhere.

Watch what happens. People will start repeating it back to you. That’s when you know it landed.

This connects directly to what we assess in The Transformation Readiness Assessment. We don’t just measure whether people received information. We measure whether they understand the personal why, whether they’re clear on what’s changing versus staying the same, and whether they know their specific role in the change.

CLOSING

Kevin: Here’s the truth about communication during change and transformation. It’s not a volume problem. It’s a clarity problem. And until we start treating it that way, we’ll keep seeing transformation initiatives fail at alarming rates.

The constant influx of information in modern organizations requires a fundamental change in communication strategy. This isn’t about dumbing things down. It’s about respecting cognitive reality. It’s about doing the hard work of distillation so your people can do the even harder work of changing their behavior.

Legitimate, lasting change starts with clarity. Effective leaders model clarity by acknowledging when their communication isn’t landing. They remove structural barriers to understanding. They create psychological safety for saying “I don’t understand” rather than forcing people to pretend comprehension. They reward employees who ask for clarification rather than penalizing them for not getting it the first time.

Remember, you’re not just asking people to understand information. You’re asking them to change their behavior based on that understanding. These are fundamentally different cognitive tasks requiring fundamentally different communication approaches.

The future belongs to organizations recognize change is nearly constant. It’s critical to learn how to achieve clarity in today’s increasing complexity. Not because simplicity is easy, but because it’s necessary for human cognition and achieving organizational goals.

Next week, Elizabeth Stewart joins me for a conversation about vulnerability in leadership during transformation. We’ll explore why leaders who admit “I don’t know” often create more psychological safety than leaders who project absolute certainty, and how strategic vulnerability builds the trust necessary for people to embrace change. It’s counterintuitive, and it’s powerful.

If this episode challenged how you think about communication during change, subscribe to the podcast, leave a rating and a comment and also share this episode with your team. Understanding the human factor and the psychology at play helps everyone.

If you’re looking for more help and guidance, Subscribe to my Ideas and Innovations Newsletter on Substack and explore my 10-part transformation psychology series on 2040digital.com.

The communication paradox affects every organization, and recognizing it is the first step toward fixing it.

Until next time, remember: Transformation isn’t about technology. It’s about people. And people need clarity, not comprehensiveness.

I’m Kevin Novak, and this has been The Human Factor Podcast. Thank you for watching or listening.

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Upcoming: Available November 20, 2025

Episode 007: The Vulnerability Advantage: Why Admitting Weakness Makes Organizations Stronger

Explore one of the most counterintuitive principles in transformation psychology: Vulnerability isn’t weakness. It’s a superpower.

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