When Your Policy Needs a Policy to Explain It
Imagine you are working on a new transformation of some kind in your department. At some point, there is a question about a process that is maybe covered in some policy, memo, or SOP. Somebody pulls it out live in a meeting, and now everyone on the call (or in the room) are taking an uncomfortably long time to read it. You’re sitting there thinking, “Did I just speed read that? And even after reading it three times, it still doesn’t make sense.”
That’s when you realize that each of you are struggling with even understanding what that document is trying to say. It may even be something relatively straight forward- digital signature requirements, delegation of duties, whatever the case is. Still, the wording used feels as if it was written by a lawyer in the 1700’s. The worst part is that many times these documents are created by others in the department, and they wanted so badly for it to sound formal that the entire original intent got lost.
“That’s when it hit us that it’s not enough to just say ‘write this new policy/procedure down’—how you write it matters just as much.”
But here’s what nobody’s asking: why does clarity keep losing to formality?
It goes without saying that your writing should be clear and concise. But the person writing that Byzantine procedure memo believes legalistic language signals authority. Meanwhile, the person reading it believes asking for clarification signals incompetence. The result is a memo that either needs a memo or “cliff notes version” to clarify the previous version.
In the end, the clients all left the meeting frustrated and in their fear of getting in trouble decided to leave off one part of their implementation. The policy existed and was documented, but it still failed because nobody could extract the actual instruction from the formality. When being explicit becomes inaccessible, you end up with the worst of both worlds—the overhead of documentation plus the chaos of everyone guessing anyway. Clarity isn’t optional polish on top of formality, it’s the entire point of writing something down in the first place.
