We Understand What We Carry

There is something I realized after a presentation I recently gave about entering the Japanese market. Among all the practical points I shared, one observation stayed with me afterward. Your success in a meeting is not whether the counterpart fully understood your solution. It is whether they can leave the room and explain it to someone else inside their organization in two sentences.

At first, this sounds like a simple communication problem. Make your message clear, simple, memorable, easy to repeat. But this is not merely a communication problem. It is a transmission problem. Organizations are not single interpreters. They are chains of retransmission. The person sitting across from you is rarely the final receiver of your idea. They become the next transmitter. Your explanation must survive multiple layers of people who were absent from the original conversation, absent from the original context, absent from the pressures, tradeoffs, emotions, and observations that gave the idea meaning in the first place.

That is why organizations reward compressible narratives. The simpler and more memorable an explanation becomes, the more likely it is to survive movement across the system. But compression creates a hidden problem. Memorability is not the same as understanding. A message can survive transmission while the meaning that originally generated it disappears. The words arrive intact while the structure that gave them meaning fails to travel with them.

Interpretation does not depend only on information. It depends on memory. Not memory as factual recall, but memory as accumulated lived experience. The internal structure formed through time, relationships, failures, emotions, environments, constraints, culture, and repeated exposure to reality. Two people can hear the exact same explanation and understand entirely different things. One sees opportunity. Another sees risk. Another sees complexity. Another feels nothing at all. The words are identical, but the interpretations are not, because interpretation is not generated purely from the present moment or through thought alone. It is reconstructed through what already exists inside us.

This reminded me of cubism. At first glance, many cubist paintings appear simplistic. Fragments, distorted perspectives, abstract shapes. A square may represent a face. A few lines may suggest movement or emotion. To some observers, it feels profound. To others, childish or incomprehensible. But cubism is not simplistic. It is demanding. It removes explicit representation and forces the observer to reconstruct meaning internally. The painting assumes the observer already carries enough memories, emotional references, symbolic associations, and lived experiences to complete what is missing. The abstraction works only if something inside the observer resonates with it. Without that internal substrate, the image remains disconnected. No amount of explanation about artistic technique or theory can fully replace the absence of those lived connections. An expert may provide context and teach the observer how to interpret the painting intellectually, but intellectual interpretation is not the same as resonance. The observer may understand the explanation while still not feeling the meaning.

The same dynamic governs organizations. A strategy presentation may be logically correct and still fail to spread because the people receiving it do not share the operational memory necessary to reconstruct its importance. Meanwhile, a much simpler narrative can travel quickly through the organization because it resonates with existing institutional memories, anxieties, ambitions, or incentives. Sometimes we believe misunderstanding is a failure of clarity, when in reality it is a gap of memory. The opposite is also true. People who have shared enough experiences often require very few words. A glance, silence, timing, small gestures become sufficient because the interpretive foundation is already shared. Meaning becomes compressed because the memory substrate already exists underneath it.

This is not only organizational. Compression is necessary because human systems cannot function without it. Organizations, cultures, and civilizations depend on symbols, narratives, myths, explanations, rituals, and abstractions that allow meaning to travel across people who do not directly share the same experiences. Yuval Noah Harari, in Sapiens, argues that humanity itself scaled through the ability to collectively believe in shared stories and symbolic structures larger than direct personal experience. Shared myths allowed humans to cooperate beyond the limits of tribe, bloodline, and immediate memory. But something begins to break when the symbols continue circulating while the inner structures that once gave them meaning gradually weaken underneath them. The explanation survives. The slogan survives. The ritual survives. The identity survives. But the lived substance required to reconstruct their meaning becomes thinner over time.

Perhaps this is why so many things in modern life increasingly feel simultaneously visible and empty. We are surrounded by symbols, interpretations, frameworks, narratives, and explanations, yet much of what once gave them depth required slow cultivation within people themselves. Symbols were never meant to replace that process. They were meant to guide it.

Then maybe the real danger begins when symbols and explanations stop being tools for developing inner understanding, and become substitutes for the inner substance we no longer cultivate ourselves.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Pablo Picasso. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Photograph taken in June 2015.