If Your Grandmother Can’t Understand It
Reflections on communication, AI, and the quiet breakdowns inside healthcare systems
I didn’t expect one sentence from a conversation with Victor Reiss, Chief Marketing Officer of UNC Health, to stay with me the way this one did:
“If your grandmother can’t understand it, it’s not ready.”
I never met my paternal grandmother. She tragically passed away before I was even born. Healthcare in the ’50s in India was, well...only for the rich.
But this moment gave it a deeper shape:
That idea hit differently after hearing Victor explain it. At first it almost felt too obvious to matter. The kind of statement you nod at and move on from because it sounds right. But I’ve noticed through the years that the ideas that actually change how you see things usually start that way. Simple enough to ignore, but persistent enough that you can’t forget.
The more I sat with it, the more it started to reshape how I think about communication in general. Because what we call communication in healthcare is often not communication at all. It’s just information moving outward without ever fully becoming understanding. And in complex systems, that gap is rarely visible, but almost always where things break.
This is something I’ve started to notice more consistently in healthcare leadership conversations: communication that is technically correct, even well-designed, but never fully translates into action. It shows up in strategy rollouts, in patient messaging, in AI adoption...everywhere meaning has to survive contact with complexity.
We spend a lot of time talking about innovation in healthcare: new tools, new platforms, new AI capabilities that promise to make things smarter or more efficient. And to be fair, a lot of it is real progress. But does progress mean clarity? And does it guarantee understanding? Somewhere between what gets built and what gets experienced, the meaning gets diluted.
What Victor helped me see more clearly is that this is not about simplifying language. Communication at its core is not the final step. It’s what determines whether strategy actually works in the first place.
He made a distinction that stuck with me. Instead of starting with what we want to say, start with who it is for, and why it matters in their life. That shift sounds small when you first hear it, but it changes the entire direction. Because suddenly, the measure of success is no longer accuracy or completeness, but whether something can actually be used in the real world.
That’s the gap I keep noticing in healthcare systems: the space between information and operational understanding. Where something can be technically correct, even well-designed, but still fail to translate into action. It’s a pattern I often find myself returning to when thinking about healthcare systems more broadly, especially as communication, data, and AI begin to co-mingle inside environments that were never designed for this level of complexity.
That idea becomes even more important when you think about AI in healthcare. Victor described it as “smarter technology,” which initially sounds like a rebrand, but it isn’t really about language. It’s about orientation. It shifts the focus away from complex ideas towards function and what the person on the receiving end can actually understand and act upon. Because people are not overwhelmed because they don’t have enough data. They are overwhelmed because they cannot clearly see what any of it means for them, or what they are supposed to do next.
There was also a moment where Victor talked about how organizations measure performance, using different types of visibility. Some systems look backward, some zoom in too closely on one initiative. But very few step back far enough to see the full picture. And in that gap between what is measured and what is actually happening, distortion slowly creeps in.
It’s a pattern that shows up repeatedly in healthcare leadership: organizations don’t struggle because of lack of effort or intelligence, they struggle because visibility rarely matches reality at the system level.
At the end of the day, people don’t engage with healthcare systems or innovations in abstract terms. They engage with one simple question, even if they never say it out loud:
What does this mean for me?
And that question determines whether communication in healthcare actually works, or quietly fails.
It’s also the question that sits underneath most of the breakdowns I’ve seen and experienced in healthcare communication, adoption, and trust especially as systems become more evolved and AI accelerates the volume of information faster than it can be made meaningful.
For the full conversation with Victor Reiss, refer to the Healthcare Leadership Operating System interview published in Authority Magazine
I am a journalist, keynote, and TEDx speaker, and the creator of Adaptive Resilience Leadership for healthcare executives. I help leaders navigate the period after major disruption, when the crisis has passed but the operating system no longer works. Organizations then enter what I call the Post-Crisis Leadership Gap. In this phase, decision quality and alignment quietly degrade, leading to costly delays and performance loss. I am a two-time cancer survivor and a board-certified health & wellness coach (NBC-HWC, ACC). I rebuilt after a life-saving stem cell transplant — a medical rebirth that revealed the gap between recovery and judgment under pressure. I have interviewed 2,000+ decision-makers across global stages and translate those insights into my best-selling book and high-impact keynotes: 🔗 saviopclemente.com ↗