Let me say something that will make project managers uncomfortable: if you are writing a three-paragraph email about a process change, you should stop and have a conversation instead. You are most likely trying to transfer understanding, and understanding cannot happen through email. It can only happen with some type of human engagement.
This is not an opinion. It is grounded in how adults actually learn. Malcolm Knowles’ andragogy research—the foundational framework for adult learning theory—tells us that adults need to understand the “why” before they invest effort in change. They need to connect new information to their existing experience. They need the opportunity to ask questions, push back, and make the material their own. None of that happens in an email thread.
The Information-Understanding Gap
There is a critical distinction that most organizations ignore: the difference between transferring information and building understanding. Email is a phenomenal information tool. Phenomenal. The breakfast meeting is Thursday. The new policy takes effect on the 15th. The system upgrade is version 3.5.8. These are bits of information, and email handles them perfectly.
But when you need someone to do something differently than what they have done before—which is what most projects require—you need them to understand why. And understanding requires engagement. It requires a teacher and a learner, or a coach and a practitioner, or two peers hashing out a disagreement. It requires presence, responsiveness, and the ability to read the room.
The learning pyramid, often attributed to the National Training Laboratories, makes the case visually. Lecture produces roughly 5% retention. Reading produces about 10%. Discussion produces 50%. Practice produces 75%. Teaching others produces 90%. Email sits somewhere between reading and lecture—the absolute bottom of the effectiveness scale.
The Post-COVID Engagement Deficit
Before COVID, organizations were already too reliant on email. During COVID, remote work forced even more communication into written channels. Post-COVID, many organizations never recalibrated. They kept the email-heavy habits even as people returned to offices where face-to-face conversation was again possible.
Here is what we have forgotten: you can do a walkabout. You can hit three people in twenty-five minutes at three different desks. That is faster than writing three emails, waiting for three responses, and then writing three follow-ups to clarify what you actually meant. The flyby can be an extremely valuable connection. But make sure that if further discussion is needed, you schedule the time to talk.
Some people got good at using chat tools during the remote period—Teams, Slack, Messenger. But others find those tools so intrusive that they will not engage that way. The point is not which channel you use. The point is that understanding requires synchronous, responsive, two-way communication. Asynchronous text—whether email or chat—is information transfer, not understanding transfer.
And there is another dimension that gets overlooked: practice. Organizations do not spend enough time letting people practice after a change occurs. If you are driving a future state that requires a skill change—working on a new system, following a new process—you have to give people time to get their hands dirty. In the AI space, this is especially true. There is absolutely no learning without practice. Everyone’s use case is different. I can sit down with ten people on the same team, and they will have maybe 10 to 15 percent overlap in how they actually use the tools. Without practice time tailored to their specific context, forget about it.
The Belief Problem
The deepest failure of email-driven change is that it never touches beliefs. You can send someone the new procedure, the updated workflow, the revised requirements document. But if you have not changed their belief about why the change matters, the behavioral change will not stick.
This happens every day in companies. You do the analysis. You run the project. You come up with the steps and tell people: these are the behaviors you have to change. Go ahead and do it. Those behaviors will not change because you have not changed the beliefs that drive them. And without belief change, the only reason people comply is fear—fear of losing their job, fear of consequences. That produces compliance, not commitment. And here is the problem with fear-driven compliance: when something goes wrong—and something always goes wrong—the fear-driven employee will not pivot. They will not find a better way. They will just keep doing it the way they were told, because that is what protects them. They have nobody to blame but you.
You will get some people doing it sometimes. But the only way compliance becomes commitment is if people internalize the “why.” And the “why” conversation is inherently human. It requires eye contact, tone of voice, follow-up questions, and the ability to tell a story that connects the change to something the listener actually cares about.
You haven’t changed belief. You’ve just decided we’re going to do this. Those behaviors will not change. If you haven’t adjusted their beliefs towards why they should do it differently, it ain’t going to happen.
So the next time you are about to write a long email explaining a change, ask yourself: am I transferring information, or am I trying to build understanding? If it is understanding, close the laptop and go have a conversation.
And remember: the absolute bottom of the learning pyramid—the method that produces the highest retention—is teaching others. If you really want someone to understand a change, do not explain it to them. Get them to explain it to someone else. That is where the deepest learning happens. Even if they are not quite ready, the act of teaching forces them to practice and learn so they will be ready. The two biggest missing links in most organizations are practice and more human-to-human contact for generating understanding. Everything else is information transfer wearing an understanding costume.