Is this the biggest lie we tell ourselves:
“I’ve made it very clear”.

Well, not in the strict sense of the word, of course. It’s not technically a lie. You did make it very clear.

But we both know that clarity is not really what happens on the stage (or in the email). Clarity is what happens in the hallways, two days later.

The actual lie is this: It’s the middle managers’ fault. They just didn’t get it. They passed it along wrong. Spinned it. Mis-quoted you.

Which they did.

Only that it wasn’t their fault. I don’t mean to be harsh here. It’s not your fault either.

It’s more like we’re operating on false assumptions.

Most leaders operate on a model of broadcast. You treat yourself as the signal tower and your team as the receivers. You obsess over the fidelity of your signal, your “Core Message.” You pack it with nuance, context, and strategic pillars because you want to be thorough.

But two days later, in the hallways, your 23 slides have become: “This is just another reorg.”

What happened?

Well, you are not a broadcast tower. You are the first child in a game of broken telephone, played by 500 tired, cynical adults.

By the time your message reaches the people who actually do the work – the sales rep in Ohio, the junior dev in Poland – your pristine “strategic pillars” have rotted away. What arrives at the bottom is not your message. It’s a degraded, mutated fragment.

Almost everyone considers this a “sender problem.” They try to fix the transmission with more volume and better logic.

But in truth, it’s a design problem.

You are designing for the sender (you),
when you should be designing for the carrier (them).

Jeff Bezos, who built Amazon, the company that changed how the world shops, crafted core messages as pass-along phrases, much like a storyteller.

In his 1997 shareholder letter (Amazon’s first), Bezos introduced Amazon’s obsession with maintaining startup-like energy, relentless customer focus, and long-term thinking over short-term profits.

But his core message wasn’t: “We maintain a customer-obsessed, long-term orientation with relentless innovation.”

He used this: “It’s always Day 1.”

A statement that’s easy to pass along.

Do you see the difference?

The first is a statement that survives 12 rounds of board room approval. The second is a statement that survives 1000 rounds of the telephone game.

But it’s more than memorable. It’s useful.

When asked “Why are we doing this risky thing?”, an Amazon VP didn’t need to start a complex argument and recite the 30-page shareholder letter. They could simply say, “Because it’s Day 1.”

To be fair, Bezos did have a core message. And he explained it in great detail, on 30 pages. But he made sure that there was a way for that message to travel from employee to employee. A pass-along version of the core.

Here’s a simple test you can use:
If someone gets asked in the hallway: “So what was the town hall about?”

Would they repeat your core message?

If not, it’s not pass-along ready.

The bad news is this:
If you can’t do that … if you can’t boil your core message to something that travels without your slides, your audience will craft something for you. And that’s what happened to your message in middle management.

If you don’t design for how messages travel, the organization will redesign them for you.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael