SOMETIMES THE MESSAGE IS CARRYING THE FAILURE.

There is a familiar response when people don't do what an organisation expected them to do. We need to communicate this better.

Customers keep calling? Improve the information.

Staff aren't following the process? Send another update.

People aren't completing the form correctly? Rewrite the guidance.

Nobody understands the new service? Create an explainer.

Sometimes that's absolutely the right answer, and sometimes communication is being asked to do something it was never capable of doing.

You can't explain your way out of a bad experience.

Imagine you've booked someone to come to your house between 9am and 1pm.

It's now 2:15. Nobody has arrived. You haven't received an update. So you call.

You're told the appointment is still showing as scheduled, but the person you're speaking to can't see where the engineer is. They'll contact another team and ask someone to get back to you.

Twenty minutes later, a beautifully written text arrives:

We're sorry your appointment has been delayed. We understand how important your time is to us.

The communication isn't really the problem. Nobody knows where the engineer is. We could spend three weeks improving the wording of that message. It still wouldn't tell you when someone is arriving.

Sometimes the message is carrying the failure.

That's the distinction we're interested in. Communication is often the point where an underlying problem becomes visible. The letter is confusing because the policy is confusing. The website can't give a straight answer because there isn't a straight answer internally.

The contact centre gives inconsistent information because different teams are working from different information. Customers keep asking for updates because the service doesn't provide certainty. Staff aren't explaining something consistently because nobody has made a clear decision about what they're supposed to explain. Then someone opens the email template and starts changing words.

The words may not be the thing that needs fixing.

Before changing the message, we'd follow it backwards.

If a customer doesn't understand something, of course we'd look at the communication.

But we'd also ask: What happened before they received it?

Where did the information come from?

Who made the decision?

What does the process require?

Does the person sending the message actually know what happens next?

Do different parts of the organisation believe different things?

And perhaps most importantly: Is what we're asking people to understand reasonable in the first place? Because sometimes the most effective piece of communication is the one you no longer need to send.

That's where the brief can change.

A project might arrive with us as:

“We need to improve our customer communications.”

Fair enough. We'll start there.

But if the evidence takes us somewhere else, we'll go somewhere else. We might discover that customers don't need clearer instructions.

They need fewer instructions. They don't need another reminder.

They need the process to remember for them.

They don't need a better explanation of which department to contact.

They need the organisation to make that handover itself.

They don't need a friendlier apology when something goes wrong.

They need someone to know that it's gone wrong before they do.

At that point, we're no longer talking about copy. We're talking about the service, and that's a much more useful conversation.

Good communication still matters. A lot

Words can remove uncertainty, make complicated things understandable, set expectations, build trust and help people make decisions.But good communication shouldn't be used to compensate indefinitely for something underneath it that isn't working. There comes a point where another email, another FAQ, another campaign and another carefully worded explanation simply add another layer between the person and the problem.

So when someone tells us:

“We have a communications problem.”

We don't disagree,we just don't assume they've told us where the problem is. Sometimes they have. Sometimes the communication is simply where the problem surfaced.

And knowing the difference can completely change what you choose to fix.