Filter messages like these, Skip Inbox

Remember watching Suits and how entertained you were when a lawyer sends over 50 boxes of paperwork (plus an insolent smirk) as “Discovery”? It’s a classic stall tactic: no need to hide the truth, just bury it under so much noise. As a philomath, I sometimes treat myself to the same Discovery when I start researching my more creative pieces. I dive in with one topic in mind, and after several turns in the rabbit burrows, find myself reading abstracts for academic articles on a completely different subject.

But for internal comms teams, this isn’t just a personal quirk—it’s an everyday systemic crisis. When leadership wants to “cover all bases” regarding a new policy or a tech rollout, they often end up delivering those same 50 boxes to their employees’ inboxes. While that data is technically important, the average employee doesn’t have the time to be a detective. Overwhelm the system with the “what,” and we are almost guaranteed to lose the “why.” I call this the Density Trade-off.

We are almost guaranteed to lose the ‘why’ when we overwhelm the system with the ‘what’.

To secure genuine buy-in—whether you’re asking a team to adopt an AI tool (isn’t that the latest thing? :)) or adapt to a massive policy shift—you have to move from Information to Insight. Where Information is the due diligence that proves you did the required work, Insight is the Refraction. It’s cutting through the mountain to find the nuggets of truth that actually change the employee’s Tuesday morning.

How you handle that mountain depends on your goal, but buy-in isn’t achieved through volume; it’s achieved through resonance. Of course, an employee wants to know you’ve done the work. What they are listening for, though, is a convincing argument on how the new policy and its specific, high-stakes adjustments will actually work for them.

This act of convincing needs more than clarity.

The real work lies in protecting the employee’s focus.

Transparency is vital, but the real work lies in not just archiving the facts, but in protecting the employee’s focus—turning a dense mandate into a relevant mission. The most valuable thing you can offer your team isn’t more data; it’s the realization that you’ve done the heavy lifting of finding exactly why this matters to their Tuesday morning.