Ever sent clear updates for a big change, only to realize later that almost no one actually read them?
Liz Lance, EdD, still remembers the moment she learned one of the most valuable lessons of her career. She'd been hired to migrate 45,000 email addresses – customer email addresses from four different legacy service providers – up into Exchange in the cloud. It was 2016, and the project was massive.
She did everything right. She created schedules and communications plans. She wrote over 150 pages of documentation. She built custom websites to guide users through the transition. She sent notification after notification, explaining exactly what would happen and when.
And almost nobody read it.
"When they lose access to the thing that you told them they were going to lose access to on the schedule you told them about, they have read none of your emails and they think that all of their email is gone and the sky is falling," Liz recalls. Working in the financial services industry made it even more intense. "A 75-year-old stock trader doesn't know how to set up their changed email on their iPhone. No idea."
Tickets flooded in asking questions she'd already answered. Users complained they hadn't been informed about changes she'd announced weeks prior. The carefully crafted communication she'd spent hours perfecting? It sat unread in countless inboxes while frustrated employees demanded to know why "nobody told them anything."
That's when the truth hit her: "Information you send is not inherently important just because you've sent it."
We've all operated under a comforting illusion: that communicating something means it's been received, understood, and internalized. Send the email. Post in Slack. Update the documentation. Check the box. Communication complete.
Except it's not.
This sender's delusion creates a dangerous gap between what we think we've communicated and what actually landed. We mistake transmission for comprehension. We confuse broadcasting with connecting. And in project management, this gap becomes a hidden source of endless work.
Think about your last major project announcement. You probably spent significant time crafting clear, comprehensive updates. You hit send feeling satisfied that everyone now knows what they need to know. But how many follow-up questions did you get asking things you'd already explained? How many team members later claimed they "never heard about that"?
They're not lying. From their perspective, they genuinely weren't informed. Because in the flood of messages competing for their attention, your update – no matter how important you thought it was – simply didn't register.
Liz's migration project taught her something crucial about human behavior: "People only read things after something's changed or when they're trying to find information that's important to them."
This insight cuts to the heart of workplace communication. Your carefully composed status update? They'll skim it if nothing's blocking their work. That important policy change? They'll read it when they bump into the new process, not when you announce it. The detailed project plan you shared? They'll engage with it when their part of the work approaches, not three weeks in advance.
This isn't because people are lazy or irresponsible. They're drowning in information just like you are. They've developed survival mechanisms to cope with the flood, and one of those mechanisms is ignoring anything that doesn't demand immediate attention.
Consider a typical scenario Liz described: "I got something right now that I don't totally understand. There are a lot of legal filings that go with running a telecom network... I have to do something about that. I'm not going to read a four-page email if I don't understand what it is."
Quick Win: Before your next big announcement, ask yourself: "What would make this information impossible for people to ignore?" If the answer is "when it affects their daily work," consider timing your communication closer to when that impact actually hits.
As project managers, we end up carrying the burden of this communication illusion. We become the translators, interpreters, and re-explainers of information that was supposedly already shared.
Someone sends a vague update about "progress on the API integration." Three people interpret this differently. You spend the next hour clarifying what was actually meant, who needs to do what, and when it's happening. The original sender thinks they communicated. The recipients think they understood. You're the only one who realizes the message never truly landed.
Liz articulates what makes project managers different from other roles: "A project manager is responsible for the outcome, a software developer is responsible for the output." This distinction explains why the communication burden falls so heavily on PMs. While an engineer can look at a message and either complete a task or ignore it, project managers face multiple interconnected actions for every incoming communication – updating risk registers, coordinating across teams, maintaining project plans, and keeping stakeholders aligned.
This complex juggling act is what Liz describes as the work "many people don't understand because people that have not had an experience doing that do not value all of the effort it takes to keep everything in sync, everybody aligned and moving forward in the same direction."
This translation work is invisible, exhausting, and never-ending. It's also entirely predictable once you understand the communication illusion.
"Project management is the unfortunate curse of anybody that actually wants to hold themselves accountable," Liz observes. "You end up project managing every element of your life."
This accountability burden shows up in how project managers process information differently. You can't just delete an email after reading it. You've done three of seven things it requires, but four remain. You're waiting on someone else to complete their part. You need to remember all of this context while scrolling through flags and folders, reconstructing mental models of what's pending.
"There's so much time lost just scrolling through, looking at my flags, remembering each of those things," Liz notes. "And yes, there are email-to-issue solutions, push it over there, but then you still have to pull it back and deal with it there."
Organizations inadvertently encourage performative communication through the systems they build. We celebrate people who "communicate well" by measuring the wrong things: how many updates they send, how comprehensive their documentation is, how many people they loop in.
But none of those metrics measure actual understanding or behavior change. They measure activity, not impact.
Quick Win: This week, after you send an important update, follow up with one person who received it. Ask them specifically what they understood and what they plan to do with the information. You'll quickly discover the gap between what you sent and what landed.
The solution isn't sending more information or sending it more clearly. The problem isn't your communication skills. The challenge is that the system itself is broken – it prioritizes broadcasting over understanding.
What project managers actually need are ways to sense what matters, not just send more messages. Liz describes what she was looking for in tools: "For me, it's about sorting through the clutter, determining what it is that I actually need to do and then following up with me to make sure I've done it in a very lightweight way."
She needed help across multiple contexts – her day job, side gigs, volunteer work – all integrated from one place. "Most people do that, that type of getting into everything because I can't help myself," she explains. The challenge is that life and work blend together, and traditional communication tools don't acknowledge this reality.
What you need to understand:
This requires a fundamental shift from push-based communication (I sent it, therefore they know) to pull-based awareness (they engaged with it, therefore they know).
Some project managers have developed intuition for sensing communication gaps. They notice patterns in questions, spot confusion early, and adjust their approach accordingly. But intuition only scales so far.
The teams that navigate this best create explicit mechanisms for checking understanding rather than assuming it. They don't just announce decisions – they verify comprehension. They don't just share updates – they confirm impact. They treat communication as a two-way loop, not a one-way broadcast.
This might mean ending meetings by having each person state what they're taking away. It could involve following up announcements with targeted questions rather than assuming silence means agreement. It often requires accepting that important information may need to be communicated multiple times, in multiple formats, before it truly lands.
Tools can help here, but only if they're designed around the right problem. Most communication tools optimize for sending and storing information. What project managers need are tools that help them understand what's being absorbed, what's being ignored, and where attention actually lives.
That's what we're building with QTalo – not another way to send more messages, but a way to sense what actually matters across the noise. By consolidating communications from different platforms and using intelligent filtering to surface what requires your attention, we're helping project managers move from broadcasting to true awareness.
Liz's perspective extends beyond individual communication challenges to systemic organizational issues. She notes that project managers often operate without the recognition they deserve: "They're not an executive, they're not a people manager, but they're responsible for all of the things that make those people successful."
This creates a precarious position. "I see project managers, tenured, knows how to do it all, highly influential, keeps it together – project managers get pulled from organizations because executive leadership doesn't understand what they do anymore. And they find out real fast."
The communication illusion compounds this problem. When everything appears to be communicated, leadership may not see the constant translation work happening behind the scenes. The project manager's role in creating actual understanding becomes invisible until they're gone.
Effective communication isn't measured by how much you send or how clearly you write. It's measured by what changes in your team's understanding and behavior.
Did people actually grasp the information? Did it influence their decisions? Did it change how they work? These are harder questions to answer than "did I send the email?" But they're the questions that actually matter.
Liz's migration taught her to look for different signals. Not "how many people did I notify?" but "how many people changed their behavior?" Not "did I write clear documentation?" but "are people finding and using it?" Not "am I communicating enough?" but "am I creating actual understanding?"
This shift in perspective changes everything. You stop feeling guilty about the 47 unread messages in your inbox because you realize most of them weren't actually important despite the sender's belief that they were. You become more strategic about when and how you communicate because you're optimizing for impact, not volume. You build systems that help you sense and respond rather than just broadcast and hope.
The communication illusion – the belief that sending equals understanding – creates enormous hidden work for project managers. We spend countless hours re-explaining, clarifying, and translating information that was supposedly already shared. We become information hubs not because we want to, but because the system makes it necessary.
Breaking free from this illusion starts with acknowledging it. “Information you send is not inherently important just because you've sent it.” Understanding doesn't automatically follow from transmission. And your job as a project manager isn't to communicate more – it's to create genuine awareness and alignment.
This means being more intentional about what you communicate, when you communicate it, and how you verify it landed. It means building systems that help you sense what's resonating rather than just what you're saying. And it means accepting that effective communication is harder, slower, and more iterative than simply hitting send.
But it's also more effective, less exhausting, and ultimately more successful. Because when you focus on creating understanding rather than just transmitting information, you spend less time re-explaining and more time actually moving projects forward.
To stay up to date on all of our blog posts and get great resources, insights, and more, sign up for QTalo's newsletter right here.
