I was at the airport earlier this year when I noticed two young women trying to figure out the check-in kiosk.
They were international students, clearly nervous, trying to navigate a system that had not been designed with them in mind. They asked a staff member for help. He pointed to the kiosk. They asked a volunteer. She said she did not know what they were asking and walked away.
I stepped in. It took a few minutes and a little patience. They got checked in and made their flight.
But I kept thinking about what I had witnessed. The part that stayed with me was not that the system was hard to use. Systems can be fixed. What stayed with me was that two people had the chance to help and chose not to because it would have taken effort. Understanding what someone needs when they are struggling to express it requires you to slow down, lean in, and care enough to try.
Communication is not done when the message is sent
We tend to think of communication as a transfer. Information moves from one place to another, and if the information arrived, the communication succeeded. An email went out. A policy was posted. An instruction was given. A form was completed.
But communication is not done when the message is sent. It is done when the person on the other end actually understands.
That sounds simple, but it changes everything. It asks us to look beyond what we intended to say and pay attention to what people were able to receive, interpret, and act on. It asks us to care about the landing, not only the delivery.
The hidden cost of assumed understanding
Think about the last all-staff email you sent or received. The last policy document. The last training session. The last set of onboarding materials handed to someone on their first day. Now ask honestly: did you know whether anyone actually understood it? Did you check?
Most of the time, we do not. We assume that if the information was clear to us, it was clear to everyone. We assume that if nobody asked questions, nobody had any. We assume that the person who nodded along understood what they were nodding at.
Those assumptions are expensive. They cost us the employee who signs something they did not understand, the client who walks away confused but too embarrassed to say so, the community member navigating a service that was never designed to be navigable for someone like them, and the new staff member who spends the first week lost because nobody thought to explain the things that seem obvious once you know them.
My daughter started a new job recently. On her first day, nobody told her which door to use. It sounds like a small thing, but when you are new and want so badly to get everything right, not knowing which door carries a weight completely out of proportion to the actual problem.
She figured it out. But I kept thinking about the people who do not. The people who start their first day already feeling like they do not belong, before they have even walked through the door. That feeling does not go away on its own. The small embarrassment of not knowing becomes the habit of not asking. The habit of not asking becomes disengagement. The disengagement looks, from the outside, like everything is fine.
Who are we designing communication for?
Clear communication is often framed as a writing or design challenge. Use plain language. Simplify your documents. Make your website accessible. All of that matters. The deeper question is who we are designing our communication for in the first place.
Most organizational communication is built for the person who already feels like they belong. The person who knows the jargon, who is comfortable asking questions, who has the confidence to push back when something does not make sense. Everyone else has to work twice as hard just to keep up, and many people do that quietly because asking for help can feel like admitting something they are not supposed to admit.
The person with lower literacy skills trying to understand what they are signing. The new immigrant navigating systems built around assumptions they do not share. The shy employee who would rather carry the confusion than risk looking like they do not understand. They are in our meetings, trainings, onboarding sessions, and service interactions, often nodding along.
Communication that reaches everyone is not only good practice. It is a commitment to the people most likely to be failed by communication designed for the average person.
Three places to start
Check in with real people
Ask whether your communication landed. Not only through a formal survey or feedback form, but through a genuine question asked to a real person. Did that make sense? Is there anything you want to talk through? What still feels unclear? Ask after meetings, proposals, training sessions, onboarding conversations, and public communications. Make it a habit, not an afterthought.
Keep the door open, and put a person in it
Automated replies and generic contact forms can be useful, but they are not enough when someone is confused, anxious, or trying to make sense of something that matters. Give people a human to reach: a name, a direct email, a phone number, or a clear next step that says there is someone here who will respond.
Look for the lost people
The person who is lost rarely announces it. Notice who is not asking questions, who went quiet in the meeting, who looked uncertain but did not say anything, and who has been disengaged in a way that might be confusion rather than disinterest. Do not wait for people to raise their hands. Go looking with care.
Start with one person
The smallest thing you can do tomorrow is simple: after your next meeting, find one person and ask privately whether everything made sense. Not in the group, where admitting confusion can be hard, but one on one afterward. Did that land for you? Is there anything you want to talk through?
It takes two minutes. It finds the people who would not have spoken up in the room. It sends a signal that matters more than you might think: someone here actually wants to know whether you understood.
The door is there. Someone has to say so.
Clear communication means everyone deserves to understand, not only the people for whom understanding comes easily. It means taking time to think about who might be left out and building something that reaches them too.
Pull up a chair. Let’s talk.
