At some point in your career, you sat in a room where someone was presenting something important. A strategy. A proposal. A decision that was going to affect your work. You understood exactly what they were saying. Every word was clear.
And you wholeheartedly disagreed.
You didn’t say anything because something about the room, the dynamic, the stakes, the relationship, made disagreeing openly feel not worth the hassle. Instead you asked a question that wasn’t really a question and simply ignored what was asked of you.
You were right, by the way. The thing you didn’t say turned out to be true.
What I want to suggest is that right now, somewhere, you are the person at the front of the room. And the people sitting where you once sat are doing exactly what you did.
Back then, the leader concluded: “They didn’t get it. I have to explain it simpler.”
I hope you don’t.
When they say “they didn’t get it,” some leaders mean it in a rather arrogant way: something must have gone wrong in the transmission. The message was right, but somewhere between your mouth and their mind, it got garbled. So they fix the transmission. They simplify. They make sure the transmission is as easy to process for their audience as possible. So that they finally get it.
But what if the transmission was fine?
People didn’t misunderstand. They disagreed. And because disagreement is uncomfortable to say out loud, they didn’t.
Now, here’s the problem:
Simplifying a message that someone disagrees with doesn’t persuade them. It slightly insults them.
Think about what simplification signals to the person on the receiving end. It says: the reason you’re not on board is that you haven’t fully understood. Which means: if you did understand, you’d agree with me.
But that’s nothing short of an accusation of intellectual failure aimed at someone who may have followed your argument perfectly well and simply found it unconvincing.
The better question in that moment is “what would have to be true for this to make sense to them?”
It’s a harder question because it requires you to take their position seriously as a position, not as a comprehension problem. It means asking what they believe, what they see (that you don’t), what they’re responsible for … all of which can make your message land very differently for them than it does for you.
Sometimes you’ll find they’re really missing a piece of context that genuinely does need explaining. But more often you’ll find a real tension: between their priorities and yours, between the short term and the long, between what the data says and what their experience tells them.
That tension isn’t resolved with simpler words – or higher energy for that matter.
And that’s bad news for an entire industry of communication advice built around persuasion. It wants you to think that the gap between you and your audience is a performance gap, and that closing it is a matter of technique. This assumption is so dominant it feels like common sense.
It’s also exactly why teams are frustrated with “high energy” leaders and audiences are frustrated with “inspiring” speeches.
Audiences don’t want you to say simpler things. They want you to say things that make sense and feel right for them. They don’t want you to persuade harder, they want you to resonate stronger.
Sometimes that means finding simpler words. It always means saying things that start from what matters to them, not what makes sense to you.
Keep lighting the path,
Michael
