The harder something is to understand, the harder it becomes to act on.
After fourteen conversations with healthcare CEOs and Chief Medical Officers, I’ve started to notice a pattern. It doesn’t show up neatly in dashboards or formal reports. Leaders are being asked to improve outcomes, control costs, manage operational demands, expand access, and support their teams.
Healthcare leaders are operating in an environment where information, technology, innovation, financial pressure, and organizational change continue to increase. However, more information does not necessarily make an organization clearer. The leadership challenge is about helping people understand what matters, why it matters, and what they are expected to do with it.
This became evident in a conversation with Victor Reiss, Interim Chief Communications and Marketing Officer at UNC Health. His perspective centered on an important idea: communication is not about delivering information, but about creating understanding. In healthcare, where clinical language and organizational complexity can easily overwhelm patients and employees, the ability to make something understandable can directly affect whether people know what to do next. That matters inside organizations as much as it does with patients. Leaders can communicate a strategy and still find that people are unclear about what it means in real-world practice. They may understand the words without understanding the direction. They may know what is changing without knowing why it is changing or how they are expected to respond. When that happens, communication has occurred, but alignment has not.
This becomes particularly important during cycles of transformation. Change creates ambiguity, and ambiguity creates space for people to develop their own interpretations. A strategic initiative can be well designed, but if leaders are not creating a coherent understanding around it, execution can begin to crack. Different teams can move in different directions, priorities can compete with one another, and employees can spend more energy interpreting the strategy than actually executing it. That is why communication cannot simply be something that happens after the important decisions have been made. It has to be part of the strategic process. Leaders need to consider not only what they are deciding, but how people will understand the decision and what it will mean for the choices they make afterward.
The same principle applies to trust. An organization can communicate its values, purpose, and commitment to the community, but trust is ultimately shaped by what people experience. During a crisis, the question is not whether an organization has the right message. Rather, it is whether its actions are consistent with everything it has been saying. Trust that is built through repeated experience gives an organization something to draw on when circumstances become difficult. When people understand what an organization stands for and consistently see those values reflected in its decisions and behavior, the narrative becomes credible. When the message and the experience begin to diverge, people notice that too.
For leaders, the question becomes larger than whether something has been communicated effectively. It is whether the communication has created enough clarity for people to make good decisions. Can employees connect the strategy to their responsibilities? Can patients understand what information means for their next step? Can different parts of the organization tell the same story and still connect it to what they are actually doing? Those questions point to something deeper than communications strategy. They point to the operating environment in which decisions are being made.
The challenge for leaders is creating enough coherence that people understand where the organization is going and can make decisions that support that direction. More communication alone won’t create that clarity.
Leadership Implication:
As healthcare organizations become more complex, leaders need to treat clarity as part of the operating system that shapes decision-making and execution. My work with healthcare leadership teams focuses on the conditions that influence how executives make decisions, create alignment, and translate strategy into action, particularly when competing demands make clarity harder to maintain.
Briefing Context:
This Executive Briefing draws on a conversation with Victor Reiss, Interim Chief Communications and Marketing Officer at UNC Health, as part of my Healthcare Leadership Operating System interview series.
Reference: Authority Magazine interview (April 2026)
This is a similar to a conversation my wife and I have had for many years about communication between healthcare professionals and the family members dealing with a healthcare issue. She's a nurse and now an administrator with many years in long term care. A good healthcare professional can convey both what's going on with the patient and provide options on what to do next. In many cases with our families she is the go to for more information and details on procedures and medications. It also upsets us both that families that don't have this resource available are just out there trusting the options that are laid out on table.