How do you simplify complex communication without dumbing it down?

There is a road sign that has appeared in different parts of the UK carrying the words:

“Pedestrian casualty reduction signal timings experiment.”

That is the whole sign.

No arrow. No symbol. No particularly clear indication of what the driver should do with this information while travelling past it at 30 miles an hour.

Slow down? Expect a longer red light? Take a moment to appreciate the transport research?

The wording is correct. That’s what is happening. But somewhere, someone (probably several people) worked very hard to make sure it said exactly what it needed to. Yet it fails the one test that actually matters – the person reading it does not know what they are meant to do.

That is what organisational complexity often appears as. Everyone involved understands the subject, so the final communication feels perfectly clear to them. The problem is that they are not the audience.

Once you know something, it is hard to remember not knowing it

Experts carry a great deal of invisible context. They know the acronyms, the history, the exceptions and why a particular phrase had to survive the seventeenth round of comments from “Legal”.

The reader knows none of this.

It’s known as the ‘Curse of Knowledge’. Once we understand something, it becomes surprisingly difficult to imagine how it sounds to somebody encountering it for the first time.

That is how a simple message becomes “the implementation of an integrated cross-functional delivery framework” rather than “we are changing how our teams work together”.

It is also why organisations often mistake formality for intelligence. A sentence grows longer. Abstract nouns begin breeding. Somebody adds “going forward” despite time having no other reasonable or useful direction. The result may sound official, but it becomes harder to understand, remember and use.

The gap between what people think something should say, and how we say it is wide. In schools they often refer to ‘INSET day’. Yet a parent has no idea what ‘INSET’ means, nor what they’re actually to do with that information.

Plain English is not about making the subject less intelligent. It is about removing the extra intelligence test imposed on the reader.

Clear does not mean incomplete

You don’t always need to remove every technical term or squeeze a complicated policy into six cheerful words. Sometimes the detail does matter. The answer is to structure it around what different readers need.

Start with the point. What has happened? Why does it matter? What, if anything, should the reader do next?

Then add the explanation. Put the technical detail underneath for the people who need it, rather than making everybody tunnel through it before reaching the answer.

Headings should do some work too. “Background” tells the reader almost nothing. “Why the price is changing” or “What current customers need to do” tells them where the answer is.

This is particularly important online, where people do not settle down with your webpage and a nice cup of tea. They scan. They arrive halfway through a task. They are often on a phone, distracted, and very willing to return to Google if the page does not help quickly.

Three useful tests

First, explain the idea privately as if you were talking to a seven-year-old. You are not going to publish that version. The exercise simply exposes the places where the original is hiding behind jargon rather than explaining the idea.

Watch what a seven year old does when you say “INSET Day”. 

Somewhere between the expert version and the seven-year-old version is usually the sentence the audience needs.

Second, read the draft aloud. I often read important writing as though I were explaining it to my mother-in-law. Sentences that looked impressively professional on screen suddenly sound like no human being has ever actually spoken them out of their actual human mouth before.

Your ears are often a better editor than your eyes.

Third, give only one person responsibility for the final voice. Collaborative writing – like tracked changes or suggestions and edits that teams make on Microsoft Word or Google Docs – can be useful. But they have a habit of producing documents that sound as though every paragraph was written by a different department during a mild disagreement. Everyone can contribute. One person must make it human again.

And sometimes the words are not the real problem. A ten-page guide may exist because the process itself is absurdly complicated. An enormous FAQ may be compensating for a service that has collected too many exceptions. A clearer explanation helps, but it cannot turn a badly designed journey into a good one.

If your organisation requires people to read a ‘Help and Support Guide’ for a new system, it means the system isn’t intuitive enough.

So it’s worth asking one more question – are we simplifying the communication, or merely explaining the confusion people will experience more neatly?

Good communication does not show people how clever the organisation is. It just allows them to understand something important without having to become an employee first.

We help expert teams turn complex strategies, policies and services into communication that remains accurate but becomes far easier to understand, trust and use.