September 25, 2026Workplace Communication Patterns That Are Costing You More Than You Think

I keep coming back to a simple, almost embarrassing image. Someone finds your website, feels a flicker of interest, and clicks through to book a call. Then they hit a form with fifteen required fields. By the time they finish, they are not thinking about your product anymore. They are thinking about how much effort this all took, and whether it was worth it. That moment, more than any tagline or sales script, is where communication either builds trust or quietly breaks it.

Melina Palmer, an applied behavioral economics expert and the founder of The Brainy Business, has spent her career studying exactly this gap between how organizations think they communicate and how people actually experience that communication. What struck me most in our conversation is how rarely bad communication comes from bad intentions. It almost always comes from a company mistaking its own internal logic for the customer’s reality, and that mismatch is where friction lives.

🎥 Watch the full podcast interview with Melina Palmer here

The Brain Runs on Autopilot, Not Logic

One of the more humbling things Melina said early in our conversation is that we like to imagine ourselves running a kind of internal supercomputer, weighing every decision with careful reasoning. That is the story we tell ourselves about how we operate, and it is almost entirely wrong. The truth, as she explained it, is that subconscious processing does the overwhelming majority of the work, while our conscious mind takes credit after the fact.

This is not a minor detail. It reshapes how we should think about communication inside a business, because it means the words on your form, the order of your questions, and the number of steps in your process are not neutral. They are either working with the brain’s natural shortcuts or fighting against them.

I have seen this pattern play out again and again in organizations that pride themselves on being thoughtful communicators. They write careful copy. They train their teams on tone. And yet the actual experience of interacting with them is full of friction, because nobody stopped to ask whether the structure itself, not just the language, was creating resistance. Communication is not only what you say. It is the entire shape of the interaction, and most of that shape is processed by the customer long before a single word is consciously read.

The Number That Should Make Every Leader Pause

Melina mentioned a statistic that has stayed with me since we spoke. Research suggests humans make roughly thirty-five thousand decisions a day. When she asks audiences how many of those decisions they actually remember making, the honest answer is usually a few hundred at most, and often far fewer. That gap between thirty-five thousand and a few hundred is not a fun trivia fact. It is a warning about how much of our communication with customers and employees is being processed somewhere we cannot see, evaluated by rules we did not write and often cannot articulate ourselves.

This is why I think so many communication strategies fail even when they are well-intentioned. A company assumes that if it explains something clearly enough, people will engage with it rationally. But the brain is not waiting for a clear explanation. It is running a fast, mostly unconscious cost-benefit calculation about whether this interaction is worth the effort, and it is making that calculation before your explanation ever lands. If your communication requires someone to override their autopilot in order to understand you, you have already lost a portion of your audience, no matter how well written the message is.

The Story That Says More Than It Seems To

Melina told a story that I have not been able to shake. She called a support line and was asked for her name and date of birth. Then she was transferred, and the next person asked for her name and date of birth again. Then a third time, from a third person at the same company. On paper, each individual request made sense to the person asking it. Verifying identity is reasonable. But from the caller’s side, it did not feel like reasonable verification. It felt like the company had not talked to itself.

What this story reveals is not a training problem. It is a communication problem at the organizational level, the kind that never shows up in a single conversation but only becomes visible when you follow a customer’s full journey across departments. Every team along that support line was communicating correctly within its own silo. Nobody was communicating across the whole experience. I think this is one of the most useful reframes in Melina’s work: communication failures are rarely about individual moments. They are about the absence of a shared view of the entire path a person walks through your organization from the very first point of contact to the very last.

Why Two Systems That Do Not Speak the Same Language Matter So Much

Melina described the brain as operating through two systems that do not communicate well with one another: a fast, automatic system and a slower, more deliberate one. When we sit down to design a form, write a script, or build an approval process, we almost always do it from the slower, deliberate system. We think it through carefully. We imagine ourselves as the thoughtful, patient version of a customer. But the person actually encountering that form is not operating from the same place. They are reacting, judging effort, and deciding in seconds whether to continue.

This is a deeper insight than it first appears, because it means the internal communication happening inside a business, between departments, between leadership and the front line, is often equally disconnected. The people designing a process are communicating with each other in the language of policy, liability, and internal efficiency. The customer is communicating in the language of effort, trust, and instinct. When those two forms of communication never meet in the middle, you end up with the fifteen field form, the three redundant identity checks, and the receipts process nobody remembers approving in the first place.

Communication as a Design Choice, Not Just a Message

I want to sit with this idea a bit longer because I think it is the heart of what Melina is really saying. We tend to treat communication as something that happens in words: an email, a script, a page of copy. But her work points to something larger. Communication also happens in structure. The number of steps in a process communicates something. The order of your questions communicates something. Whether you ask for information now or later communicates something, whether you intend it to or not.

This reframing matters enormously for business leadership, because it means the responsibility for good communication does not sit only with marketing or customer service. It sits with whoever designed the intake form, whoever built the approval chain, whoever decided a call needed to be transferred three times before reaching the right person. Every one of those decisions is a communication decision, whether the person making it thought of it that way or not. The moment leaders start treating operational design as a communication channel, not just a logistics detail, they start noticing friction they had walked past for years.

The Question That Cuts Through Most of the Noise

What I appreciate about Melina’s approach is that it does not ask leaders to redesign everything at once. Instead, she offers a narrower, more practical question: do you need this piece of information right now, or would it simply be nice to have later? Most forms, most approval steps, and most intake processes are full of the second kind, information gathered because it might be useful someday, not because it is required for the conversation happening right now.

This single question is a small act of communication discipline. It forces a business to distinguish between what it wants to know and what the customer needs to give in order to move forward. Every unnecessary field, every redundant approval, every extra verification step is a small tax on trust, collected at the exact moment a person is deciding whether they feel understood. I have started applying this question to my own work as well, asking whether a step exists because it serves the person in front of me or because it once served someone else, in some other context, for some other reason that no longer applies.

From Customer Friction to Employee Friction

It would be easy to treat this conversation as purely a customer experience issue, but Melina’s broader body of work, including her book on what employees need and cannot tell leadership, makes clear that the same dynamics operate inside teams. Employees experience friction from internal communication in exactly the same automatic, often unconscious way customers do. A confusing approval chain, a policy that contradicts itself between departments, a request for the same information from three different systems; these things do not just slow work down. They quietly communicate to employees that the organization does not have its own house in order, and people notice that far more than leaders assume.

This connects communication directly to corporate culture in a way that is easy to overlook. Culture is often described in terms of values statements and mission language, but employees form their actual read on a company through the friction of daily communication, how hard it is to get an answer, how many times they have to repeat themselves, and how consistent the message is from one department to the next. A culture that talks about trust while operating a communication process full of redundancy and confusion is sending two contradictory messages at once, and the operational one usually wins.

Why This Matters for Sales and Growth

There is a temptation to treat friction as a minor annoyance, something that costs a little conversion here and there but does not fundamentally threaten a business. Melina’s experience working with organizations like Walmart, Google, and Procter & Gamble suggests otherwise. Friction in communication is not a rounding error. It shapes whether a lead becomes a customer, whether a customer becomes a repeat customer, and whether an employee becomes an advocate or someone quietly looking elsewhere.

This is where the connection to sales becomes clear. A sales process built entirely around convincing someone with the right words, while ignoring the structural friction surrounding those words, is working against itself. The best communication in the world cannot fully offset a process that makes someone fill out the same information three times or navigate five approvals to get a simple answer. I think this is why Melina’s work resonates so strongly with people building strategy around growth. Removing friction is not a nice-to-have alongside good communication. It is a form of communication in itself, one that tells the customer, clearly and immediately, that their time and effort matter to you.

Seeing Your Own Business Like a First-Time Customer

One of the more useful reflections from our conversation is the idea of looking at your own process the way a first time customer would see it. This sounds obvious, but it is genuinely difficult to do, because familiarity erases friction from view. The people who built your intake form do not experience it as a stranger would. They already know why each field exists, so the form feels reasonable to them in a way it never will to someone encountering it cold.

This is where communication breaks down most quietly, not because anyone is careless, but because insiders lose the ability to see their own systems from the outside. I have found that the simplest fix is also the hardest to implement consistently: actually walking through your own process as a customer would, form field by form field, call transfer by call transfer, and noticing where you feel resistance building. That resistance is information. It is the customer’s side of a conversation your business has not been listening to.

Communication, Change, and the Discomfort of Removing Steps

Reducing friction almost always means removing something, a field, a step, an approval, a layer of verification, and removal is uncomfortable for most organizations. Every one of those steps was added for a reason at some point, often a legitimate one. This is where communication intersects with change, because simplifying a process is rarely just an operational adjustment. It requires someone to say, clearly, that a step the organization has relied on for years is no longer necessary, and that kind of statement tends to meet resistance even when the data supports it.

What I take from Melina’s perspective here is that removing friction is an act of communication courage as much as it is a design exercise. It requires leaders to communicate honestly with their own teams about what is actually necessary versus what has simply become habit. The three redundant identity checks in her support line story almost certainly exist because at some point, in some department, someone decided that extra verification was worth the friction. Nobody ever went back to communicate across those departments and ask whether all three checks together were still serving anyone.

What This Means for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

For anyone building something new, whether inside a large company or as an entrepreneur starting from scratch, this conversation offers a genuinely practical lens. Early stage businesses often assume that better communication means more explanation, more detail, more reassurance built into every touchpoint. Melina’s work suggests the opposite is frequently true. The best communication is often the version with fewer steps, fewer requirements, and fewer chances for the customer’s autopilot brain to decide the effort is not worth it.

This is also where communication connects meaningfully to innovation. Innovative products and services are not only judged on features. They are judged on how easy they are to actually access and use, and that ease is itself a form of communication. A frictionless sign-up process communicates confidence and respect for the customer’s time. A cluttered one, no matter how innovative the underlying product, communicates the opposite, regardless of what the marketing says.

Building a Culture That Notices Its Own Friction

The final thread I keep returning to is that noticing friction is a skill, and like most skills, it requires deliberate practice. Organizations do not naturally develop the habit of examining their own communication from the outside. It has to be built in, often through the kind of professional development that trains people to question processes they have long since stopped seeing clearly. Melina’s work with the Certificate in Applied Behavioral Economics reflects exactly this idea: that understanding how people actually make decisions is a learnable discipline, not an innate talent some leaders happen to have and others do not.

I think the organizations that will handle this well over the next decade are the ones that build regular habits of walking their own customer experience from the outside in, treating every unnecessary field, every redundant question, and every extra approval as a communication failure worth fixing rather than an unavoidable cost of doing business. Communication, in this sense, stops being a department and becomes a discipline the whole organization practices together.

Finding the Friction You Cannot Yet See

There is something almost freeing about accepting that most of your own communication problems are invisible to you by default. It removes the blame and replaces it with a task. You are not failing because you do not care about your customers or your employees. You are failing, if you are failing, because you are too close to your own systems to see them the way a stranger would. The fix is not a personality change. It is a practice of looking, regularly and deliberately, from the outside, and treating every point of friction as a communication signal rather than a minor inconvenience to be tolerated.

Every organization I have ever studied that gets this right shares one trait. They treat communication as something that happens through structure and process, not only through language, and they build the habit of questioning their own steps before a customer or employee is forced to question them first. That habit, more than any script or slogan, is what separates businesses people trust from businesses people merely tolerate.

The Lesson That Stayed With Me

If there is one idea from this conversation with Melina Palmer that I keep returning to, it is this: communication is not measured by how much you explain. It is measured by how little effort it takes for someone to understand and act.

A business can be full of well-intentioned, articulate, carefully worded communication and still create enormous friction, because the friction is not in the words. It is in the structure surrounding them.

Real communication, the kind that builds trust rather than eroding it, requires organizations to see themselves the way a first-time customer or a new employee sees them, and to have the discipline to remove whatever no longer earns its place. That is a harder task than writing a better script, but it is the one that actually changes how people experience your business.

🎧 Learn more from Melina Palmer and explore her work here: Melina Palmer
📺 Watch the full conversation on communication and friction here: Full Interview
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💬 Discover more thought leadership on business leadership here: Business Leadership