Even our best work can fail before anyone reads a word of it.
Every organisation I’ve worked with, in the middle of change, reaches for the same lever: tell people more, tell them sooner, explain it again. It’s the right instinct. The alternative, silence, is genuinely corrosive.
For a long time, I believed that was largely the answer. If people were unsettled, we simply hadn’t communicated well enough. However, the more change work I’ve done, the less that’s held up. I’ve watched organisations communicate with regularity, honesty and clarity about what wasn’t yet decided, with leaders visible and available, and still find their people tired and slow to engage.
I’ve watched the reverse too: when teams who were told very little, somehow thrive and keep moving forward. Something wasn’t quite chiming.
What information can’t fix
Part of it is obvious once you’ve seen it. A great deal of the uncertainty people carry through change can’t be resolved with information, because the answer doesn’t exist yet. Nobody is withholding it – it just hasn’t been agreed. So, we send more messages into a gap no message can fill.
But that’s only part of the story, because even the things we genuinely could tell people didn’t always land either. I’ve come to think that when a well-crafted message doesn’t land, it isn’t always the message. It’s that the message didn’t account for the state of the receiver.
We spend almost all our effort on the sending, the wording, the timing, the channel. We rarely ask what condition the person will be in when it arrives. A message doesn’t land in a neutral space. It lands with a person who is already carrying something, and in change, what they’re carrying is usually the uncertainty itself.
Why not-knowing is expensive, not neutral
This is the part I used to underweight. Not knowing isn’t a passive state people simply wait out; it’s active, and it’s costly. In 2016, a UCL team led by Archy de Berker put people through a task where they faced a fluctuating chance of a mild electric shock, and tracked their stress through pupil dilation, skin conductance and self-report. The worst state, physiologically, wasn’t certainty that the shock was coming. In that task, not knowing produced more measurable stress than knowing something bad was on its way.
That’s the mechanism underneath everything else here. Uncertainty doesn’t sit quietly in the background while people get on with things. It runs, using exactly the attention and energy we would otherwise spend on our work and on absorbing what we’re being told. The tool we reach for becomes less effective at precisely the moment the situation makes us reach for it harder.
We communicate more, to people who have less capacity to hear it, and then conclude we haven’t communicated enough.
Why this bites hardest in change
Organisational change research backs this up directly. Bordia, Hobman, Jones, Gallois and Callan, writing in the Journal of Business and Psychology in 2004, found that change-related uncertainty splits into three kinds: uncertainty about where the organisation is going (strategic), how it will be structured (structural), and what happens to your own role (job-related).
Their most useful finding, for anyone leading change, is what buffers the damage. It’s perceived control. When people feel they have some agency in how change unfolds, even a small amount, the psychological strain that job-related uncertainty produces falls sharply. In their study, giving people a genuine say in decisions reduced structural and job-related uncertainty, while communication chiefly eased strategic uncertainty.
That reframes the practical question. It isn’t only ‘have we said this clearly enough’, it’s ‘have we given anyone a way to feel some control over what happens next’.
Reduce what you can. Build capacity for what’s left.
None of this means communicate less; that would make things worse, not better. Where certainty can genuinely be given, give it. It makes a tangible difference. Capacity isn’t an alternative to communication. It’s the condition on which communication depends.
But there’s more available than most leaders use, and it doesn’t require a decided outcome. Even when we can’t say what the outcome will be, we can nearly always say when we’ll know, how we’ll be told, and who will tell us. That’s process certainty, and, as per Bordia and colleagues, it works because it hands back a measure of control even while the real answer is still out of reach.
Organisations often stay silent because they can’t answer the real question, without realising the process itself was answerable the whole time. Silence rarely reads as honesty. It often reads as bad news.
The distinction sounds small: the message, and the state of the receiver. I don’t think it is. The more change I work through with organisations, the less I ask whether people understood what we told them, and the more I ask whether we ever put them in a position to.
