You Are Probably Not as Clear as You Think

I work with smart people who talk past each other, convinced they are not. Both sides leave sure they understand, only to be surprised when things go wrong. After years of helping firms with operations and communication, I have learned that breakdowns rarely happen because of skill. They happen because of structure, which can be fixed.

Why clarity matters

When your listener hears you, they hold your words in short-term memory, link them to what they know, and decide what matters. All this happens in working memory, which is limited. More information does not help. It makes understanding harder.

The cost does not show up immediately. It shows up as a second meeting, a missed deliverable, or a client who confidently did the wrong thing, which is probably the most expensive surprise on the list. The frustrating part is that most communication problems are not intelligence-related. They stem from hidden assumptions and cognitive overload. If you know what to look for, they are entirely preventable.

Three common traps

The first is what researchers call the Curse of Knowledge, and it is exactly what it sounds like. Once you understand something thoroughly, you lose accurate memory of what it felt like not to, and the smarter you get in a domain, the worse you tend to estimate someone else’s starting point. There is a well-known study where participants tapped out a song while others tried to identify it. It was predicted that listeners would recognize about half the songs, but listeners identified only 3% because the tappers could hear the full melody, while the listeners heard only the tapping.

Your accounting expertise works the same way. You have years of pattern recognition that your client, new team member, or colleague from another department lacks. If you do not rebuild that context, they will fill the gaps themselves, often incorrectly.

The second trap is information overload, and it is worth being specific because it is not only about sending too much. Research summarized in the Harvard Business Review found that 38% of employees report receiving excessive communication, but the real problem is duplicative, irrelevant, or inconsistent information that forces the listener to triage rather than comprehend. Most of us have sent that message, the one that was really ten messages crammed into one, and watched what happened next. The replies come in on every part except the one that needed an answer. At least one person responds with an emoji, because that is definitely the same as answering the question. By the next morning, the thing you needed disappeared into a thread of side conversations. It is entirely preventable, and the fix happens before you hit send.

The third trap is jargon, which shockingly also applies to accounting. Research from LinkedIn and Duolingo found that 40% of workers have been confused or made mistakes because of workplace jargon. Since I come from a design background, allow me to put you in your client's seat for a moment. Here is a sentence I could send you: "We should refine the typographic hierarchy by adjusting the baseline grid, tightening the tracking and kerning on the display face, and rebalancing the negative space so the composition reads clean across responsive breakpoints while maintaining brand-aligned color contrast ratios." What I mean is: "Make the text easier to scan by improving the size and spacing of the headings, tighten the letter spacing in the title font, and adjust the layout so it looks clean on different screen sizes while still matching your brand colors." Same information, but one version is precise for a designer, while the other is usable for the person who hired one. Your clients feel that way every time they receive a message written for a colleague instead of for them. We should translate first, then give technical labels. Accuracy that the listener cannot parse is not accuracy at all.

A simple communication framework

RISE (Reduce, Illustrate, Segment, Engage) is a framework to ensure your message is clear before it leaves your hands. It does not matter whether you are sending an email, walking someone through a process, updating a client, or handing off work to your team. The framework stays the same; the only change is how disciplined you are about using it.

Reduce is often skipped, but it would prevent most problems if people would just do it. This is not about writing less. It is about being honest with yourself about what the other person needs in order to take the next step, then having the discipline to cut everything that does not serve that. A useful gut check is asking whether removing a sentence would change what the reader does next. If the answer is no, it does not belong there.

Illustrate means giving the listener a way to see what you are describing, whether that is a diagram, a quick scenario, or a before-and-after that makes the concept something they can hold onto rather than just something they heard. Pairing words with relevant visuals improves understanding, but only when the visuals are purposeful. Decorative complexity adds processing cost without adding meaning, and a clean, specific example will outperform an elaborate graphic almost every time.

Segment is grounded in Mayer’s multimedia learning research, which found that people retain information better when it is presented in distinct chunks, not a continuous stream. In practice, that means finishing one thought before introducing the next, telling people where you are in the explanation, and giving enough breathing room between ideas for each to land. That awkward pause you want to fill is more useful than you think.

Engage means verifying understanding before a misunderstanding has time to become a rework cycle. It is the step most communicators skip because the conversation felt smooth. “Felt” is not confirmed. Asking “Does that make sense?” produces a nod. Asking someone what action they plan to take next yields concrete information and surfaces gaps before they turn costly.

Two formats to apply

For internal messages, the approach is simple: state what is happening and why it matters, your recommendation, any potential blockers, and the owner of the next steps with a deadline. More than this is probably noise.

For client communication, the structure shifts slightly because the audience is different. Start with what you found as observable facts, then what it means for them in plain language, then what you recommend without hedging, and finally what happens next, including anything the client needs to do on their end. If their action item is buried in the middle of a paragraph, do not be surprised when it does not happen.

Where to start

Pick one message you plan to send this week and run it through RISE before sending it. Add one question at the end that confirms the next step before work starts. Then measure what changes. Count the follow-up questions, the correction loops, and the deliverables that come back wrong. If those numbers go down, your communication is working. The data will tell you more than your instincts will.