One of the major learnings I had working in the founder’s office role was to add another lens for how to view organizations: through the lens of nervous systems. Not just systems of processes.

A new policy, an email from leadership about team performance, a random expression in Slack , any message doesn’t land in a vacuum. It hits a person. And that person carries their own history, their own current stress, their own default reaction. When we changed something as simple as the WFH policy or holiday list, I could almost predict who’d react how. The rebel pushed back. The anxious one panicked. The gossiper gossiped. Every time.

I used to think this was obvious. Just send the email, people will read it, they’ll understand. But watching it happen up close, I realized something: the same words don’t mean the same thing to everyone. Not even close.

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on this. Read a few things, talked to some friends serve in the armed forces. They told me about a selection assessment they run — give someone a single word, and ask them to write sentences with it. Same word. Same context. Same conditions, as controlled as they could make them. And still, the sentences came out completely different. Not wrong, just different. It was almost funny how far apart people landed, starting from the exact same point.

That’s when it clicked for me. Communication was never going to be clean. There’s no such thing as a message that transmits without distortion, because there’s no neutral receiver on the other end. There is a nervous system, doing what it always does.

I used to think a good communicator’s job was to strip a message down and deliver it with as little of their own interpretation added as possible. Now I think that’s backwards. A message with zero interpretation doesn’t stay zero-interpretation. It just means the distortion happens on the other end, inside a nervous system you don’t control. You can’t remove the noise by staying quiet. You can only choose where it gets added.

There are two things going on here, and they’re not the same. One: each person has a tendency that repeats. The rebel rebels. The anxious one stresses. This part you can almost plan for. Two: each person is carrying context you can’t see. A rough week. A hard year. Or perhaps a happy phase. This part changes daily, and you’ll never fully know it’s there.

This is also when I stopped thinking of middle managers and internal comms folks as overhead. Early in my career, I saw their job as administrative “just send the email and pass on messages.” Now I understand that their real job is entropy management.

They take a decision from the top, absorb some of its shock, keep their team’s context in mind. They translate it into something a person can actually sit with. And hope the net direction still pushes the team where it needs to go.

The cost of this realization is hyper-vigilance. You start reading too much into every message. But you do get better at the calibration! Knowing when to just play along, and when it actually needs a serious adjustment.

PS: You’ve probably just read a slightly different version of this post, depending on which frequency your antenna is tuned to : )