Smart. Brief. And Dangerously Malnourishing.
By David Jarrard
4-minute read
Smart Brevity works. So does sugar.
You know the best-selling writing concept trademarked by Axios’ founders. The one that champions concise, bullet-pointed, headline-heavy prose for audiences fatigued by long words and longer paragraphs.
Like sugar, the style is engineered for speed and spiky attention. It keeps us moving without slowing us down for, you know, hard thinking.
But too much sugar for too long is not healthy.
No one thrives on sugar alone — nor on believing they understand complex issues because they’ve consumed a few bites of quippy takes.
Our bodies — and our institutions — crave more than quick hits. We need nutrient-rich meals, too.
The great vulnerability of our time is not a lack of information; it’s the illusion of understanding.
Our notoriously enigmatic healthcare system is especially vulnerable in this omnipresent, impatient style of communication.
It often feels like we want just enough information to be dangerous.
Brevity as signpost, not destination
In a world where we check our phones hundreds of times a day, clarity and simplicity feel like mercy.
Give us a six-word headline and three bullets, and we feel informed enough to move on. Anything more layered can seem dubious; we may even suspect that complexity is hiding something nefarious or incompetent.
To be fair, most writing deserves trimming — sometimes whacking. Corporate memos. Anesthetic jargon. Presentations that wander aimlessly.
The KISS principle didn’t need a rebrand (looking at you, Strunk & White, old friend), but it got one with the publication of Smart Brevity. The book resonated because the problem is real.
We like it. It sits on our shelves. Linguistic bloat exhausts us, too, and obscures understanding instead of deepening it.
It’s not that snappy writing is a problem. Sometimes a headline is all we need.
The challenge is that we’ve over-indexed to shorthand for nearly everything.
We live our lives — and run entire enterprises — informed by executive summaries, convinced we’ve read the appendices.
Brevity should be a signpost on the road to understanding, not the destination.
Not cotton candy
A great challenge for our industry is that healthcare is not cotton candy.
It’s protein. Dense, harder to chew and sustaining.
Try explaining how healthcare “works” in six words. Or six headlines. Or six slides.
Go ahead; I know you’ve tried. You can’t. Not honestly.
Healthcare is a Byzantine puzzle of regulation, reimbursement and human relationships that often appears to defy common sense. Its financial structures don’t map neatly to its moral aspirations. Its margins don’t tell the story of its mission. Its purpose — to relieve suffering and promote human flourishing — cannot be reduced to a spreadsheet.
Don’t mishear this point: Complexity is not a virtue. It is not the same as competence and not all of what is complex deserves preservation. But pretending complexity doesn’t exist is its own form of distortion.
In literary terms, healthcare is not The Hardy Boys; it’s The Brothers Karamazov.
There are no tidy villains. No clean reveals in the final chapter. Only flawed humans navigating systems built over decades, each generation reacting to the one before, inching toward the good as best they can.
Who has time for that story? Give us the CliffNotes, please.
In an age of information candy, healthcare’s door-stopping complexity makes it vulnerable to the unbridled confidence of meme-driven wisdom.
The danger to healthcare isn’t ignorance. It’s premature clarity.
Explanation as evasion
When the only acceptable form of communication moves at the speed of a scroll, nuance can feel like evasion. Slowing down to unpack trade-offs can land as excuse-making.
But when we reduce the complex to the simple, sustaining margins can become “greed.” Costs become “waste.” Delays become “incompetence.”
Take a glance at Jarrard’s national surveys, and you’ll find trust in healthcare eroding, even as understanding of its machinery remains shallow. Many feel helplessly caught in the grinding gears of a system they don’t comprehend.
Do you blame them?
Some will argue that the deeper problem here isn’t brevity. Fair enough. But trust is built in the tension between clarity and honesty. Oversimplification — which leads to dashed expectations — erodes trust just as surely as obfuscation.
In this attention-addled environment, healthcare leaders begin with a cultural handicap.
If stakeholders don’t understand at least part of how the machinery works, the vacuum will be filled by someone else’s explanation.
And those explanations are rarely neutral.
Training the AI writers
As if this weren’t enough, we are now training machines to perfect this surface-skimming communication.
A Wall Street Journal column last week poked fun with the quirks of AI writing, with its bullet points, “key insights” and “takeaways.”
Where did the bots learn that voice? From our slide decks, our summaries and our obsession with linguistic efficiency above all.
The more our prose is solely fast and furious, the more we teach AI that “good” writing must move like a racer. What was once a helpful discipline becomes a cultural norm and then, the infinitely scalable algorithmic default.
We talk like computers because computers talk like us, in a spiral that becomes incomprehensible.
This isn’t an argument against AI. It’s a powerful tool. But tools shape behavior and we build with the instruments on our workbench.
Going deep today — and persuading others to follow — requires the defiant intention of a craftsman. That is a leader’s work.
Healthcare’s epic tale
Healthcare is an epic tale — entangled, consequential and touching every person in every community. Boards. Lawmakers. Employees. Neighbors. Patients.
True appreciation by each of these people of healthcare’s great engineering and challenges will not be earned through pithy points on a slide deck.
But we can use succinct language not as explainers, but as invitations. When we’ve earned the audience’s nod — tell me more, they say — we can go deeper.
This is storytelling in its truest sense. Not a recitation of facts, but a guided journey toward understanding.
It requires persistence in an impatient culture. It requires resisting the quick applause that comes with tidy answers.
And it requires acknowledging something uncomfortable: Not every problem can be made simple without being made wrong.
This is the work of leadership today: communicating well in a Smart Brevity world without surrendering to it.
Smart Brevity works. So does sugar.
If we feed understanding exclusively on what’s fast and sweet, we shouldn’t be surprised when we — and our stakeholders — lack the strength for what’s heavy. And healthcare has many heavy things to lift today.
But strength comes from what we’re willing to chew on.
Image credit: Drew Do
