Most technical founders can explain what they're building to someone who already cares. The investor who understands the space gets it immediately. The engineering hire nods along. The co-founder finishes your sentences. The problem appears with everyone else. The journalist. The enterprise buyer. The partner who needs to sell it internally. The language that works in the room where everyone shares context falls apart the moment context disappears. And the instinct—almost universal—is to simplify. Strip the jargon. Use analogies. Shorten the sentences. Translate the complex thing into a simple thing, and people will understand.

This is the trap. Not because simplification is wrong, but because it solves the wrong problem. You can translate a research paper into plain English and still produce something nobody finishes reading. Clarity is not the issue. Cognitive science has known this for decades—Daniel Kahneman and Jerome Bruner both mapped how the brain runs two systems: one that processes logic, and one that processes narrative.¹ Translation addresses the first. It makes information easier to parse. But parsing is not caring. No amount of clearer language builds the structure that makes a reader feel why something matters to them specifically. That structure is absent, and simplification cannot create what was never designed.

I spent three years in production at Lotus during their shift from petrol to electric. For a heritage brand, this transition is existential—the thing that made them special was about to change completely. There were months of technically accurate communication: engineering specifications, performance benchmarks, clear explanations of what the new cars could do. All correct. None of it landed. Then the strategy team arrived at a line—"Are you a driver or what?"—and something shifted overnight. Not the facts. Not the vocabulary. The architecture. The question reframed who Lotus was for, not what Lotus made. Suddenly every asset in the pipeline had a reason to exist. What changed wasn't the complexity of the message. What changed was the organising principle underneath it.

The gap most technical companies feel—the sense that people aren't getting it—is rarely a translation problem. The information is usually fine. What's missing is the architecture that makes someone feel the stakes before they understand the details. Translation converts language. Architecture creates the conditions for caring. Confusing one for the other is how companies end up with a perfectly clear message that moves no one.