Content problem, training problem or workflow problem? How to work out what’s actually going wrong

There are plenty of people who will happily create more content for you.

Especially when creating content is what they are being paid to do.

But before another explainer, FAQ, training module or campaign gets added to the pile, there is a more useful question to ask:

Does this content actually need creating?

That can be surprisingly difficult to answer when you work inside an organisation or industry.

You already know too much.

You know the terminology, the process, the product, the background and the reason something exists. You cannot completely remove that knowledge and experience the communication in the same way someone seeing it for the first time would.

That is often where clarity gets lost.

The problem is not always that organisations lack content.

Sometimes they lack clarity about what problem the content is actually supposed to solve.

The same symptom can have very different causes

Imagine a healthcare organisation launches a new digital service and uptake is poor.

The first instinct might be to rewrite the patient information.

But what if patients understand the service perfectly well and staff simply do not remember to introduce it?

That starts to look more like a workflow or training problem.

What if staff explain it consistently, but patients abandon the sign-up process halfway through?

That points more towards user experience.

And what if the service itself works well, but the people most likely to benefit do not have reliable digital access?

That is an access problem.

Same symptom.

Very different cause.

This is why jumping straight to “we need better content” can be expensive, time-consuming and ineffective.

Is it actually a communication problem?

If people keep asking the same question despite already being given the information, that does not automatically mean they need more information.

It may mean the message is unclear, badly timed or simply not answering the question they actually have.

You might see patients or professionals misunderstanding what something is for, hesitating because they are unsure what happens next, or different teams describing the same product or service in completely different ways.

Sometimes the information is technically correct but still hard to make sense of.

In those situations, communication probably does need attention.

That might mean changing the language, reorganising the information, making the next step clearer or explaining the value of something in a way that feels relevant to the person receiving it.

But first, you need to know that understanding really is the problem.

Or is it a training problem?

Sometimes the patient-facing information is fine.

The problem sits with the people expected to explain or support it.

A team may understand the broad idea behind a new service or process but still feel unsure about how to talk about it in practice.

One person explains it one way. Another barely mentions it. Someone else avoids discussing it because they are worried they will be asked a question they cannot answer.

That can quickly create inconsistent communication.

In healthcare, I see this distinction matter a lot.

The training may have been delivered. The information may exist. Everyone may technically know what is supposed to happen.

But that does not necessarily mean they feel confident putting that knowledge into practice.

If the gap is between knowing and doing, another patient leaflet is unlikely to fix very much.

Could the workflow be the real problem?

You can explain a process perfectly and still get poor uptake if the process itself is a nuisance to follow.

People may understand exactly what they are supposed to do and even agree that it matters, but the way the process works makes it harder than it needs to be.

Perhaps a referral takes too many steps.

Maybe staff have to leave one system and log into another.

Responsibility may be unclear.

Or the new process simply does not fit naturally into an already busy clinical day.

This is where you start to see workarounds, forgotten tasks and good intentions disappearing as soon as things get busy.

If the workflow is making it harder for people to do what you need them to do, more communication may simply add another layer to the problem.

What if the system itself is hard to use?

This is where user experience, or UX, becomes important.

Take digital medical history forms.

Dental practices often ask patients to update their medical history online before an appointment. When the information comes back incomplete, it is easy to assume the patient has not read the instructions properly or has simply missed something.

But that is not always what is happening.

Sometimes the wording is unclear and the patient does not understand what information they are being asked to provide.

Sometimes the wording is perfectly reasonable, but the form itself is difficult to navigate. The patient may not know what to click, whether they have selected the right option, or whether the form has actually been submitted.

From the practice side, the symptom looks the same:

an incomplete medical history form.

But the cause could be very different.

One problem may need clearer communication.

The other may need a better user experience.

And in some cases, it may be a bit of both.

That is why it helps to look beyond whether someone completed the task and ask where they actually got stuck.

And sometimes it is an access problem

There is another possibility.

People may understand the message.

They may know what to do.

The process may be simple.

And they still cannot act.

Cost, time, language, transport, digital access or competing priorities can all create barriers that communication alone cannot remove.

That distinction matters.

Otherwise, organisations can end up trying to solve an access problem with more information.

Sometimes people are not failing to act because they do not understand.

They simply cannot easily do what is being asked of them.

Before you create more content, ask a different question

Instead of starting with:

What should we create?

Start with:

What is stopping the behaviour we want?

Then work backwards.

Do people understand what they are being asked to do?

Do they believe it is relevant to them?

Do staff know how to support it?

Does the workflow make it easy?

Is the system intuitive?

Can people realistically access what is being offered?

Those questions help separate the symptom from the cause.

And that matters because the wrong diagnosis usually leads to the wrong fix.

Sometimes the hardest part is being too close to the problem

This is where internal teams can struggle.

When you know a product, service or process inside out, it becomes difficult to see what someone else does not know.

You fill in gaps automatically.

You understand the terminology without thinking about it.

You know where to click, what happens next and what a sentence is trying to say, even when none of that is obvious to someone encountering it for the first time.

That does not mean the internal team has done anything wrong.

It simply means familiarity changes what you notice.

And sometimes that is exactly when an outside perspective becomes useful.

Not someone whose first instinct is to create more material, but someone who can look at what is already there and investigate what is actually not working.

Communication matters. But it cannot fix everything.

Better communication can solve a communication problem.

It cannot repair a workflow that makes things unnecessarily difficult.

It cannot replace training.

It cannot make an awkward system easy to use.

And it cannot remove an access barrier.

There is no shortage of content that can be created.

The more useful question is whether creating it will actually solve the problem.

If the answer is not obvious, that is often the point where a structured outside review can help bring some clarity.

Not sure what is actually getting in the way?
My Communication Clarity Audit is designed to help identify whether the problem sits with the communication itself, the training around it, the workflow, the user experience or something else.

Prefer to work through it yourself first?
I’ve also created a short diagnostic guide to help you work out where the problem may be sitting.