Confusing on Purpose?
A few weeks after a doctor’s visit, an envelope arrives from your health insurer. Near the top it tells you, often in capital letters, that THIS IS NOT A BILL. Below that are several dollar amounts: what the doctor charged, what the plan allowed, what the plan paid, and what you may owe. A week later the bill itself arrives from the doctor’s office, with a number that doesn’t match the one the insurer said you might owe.
There may be a perfectly good reason for the difference: an adjusted claim, say, or one office working from older numbers. Neither document makes that easy to figure out.
So you call. The insurer tells you to ask the doctor’s office. The doctor’s office says the claim is still being processed. Somewhere around the second hold message, a reasonable person starts to wonder whether anyone designed it this way on purpose.
Plenty of organizations make people work this hard: hospitals, insurers, banks, colleges, and the software companies whose apps sit on your phone. If the confusion keeps working in their favor, why would they fix it?
Sometimes it is on purpose
In 2022, the Federal Trade Commission published a report on what it calls dark patterns: design practices that trick or manipulate people into buying things or giving up their privacy. The report describes subscriptions that are easy to start and hard to cancel, fees that appear late in checkout, and countdown timers that invent a deadline. Someone designed the experience that way.
Other cases are harder to sort out. In a 2022 review of financial aid offers from a nationally representative sample of 176 colleges, the Government Accountability Office estimated that 91 percent of colleges either left out the net price or understated it. Some offers excluded important costs; others treated loans, which have to be repaid, as though they reduced the price of attending.
The report doesn’t say what the people who prepared the offers had in mind. Maybe someone wanted the college to look less expensive. Maybe the offer was assembled from a template nobody had questioned in years. Either way, a student sitting at the kitchen table is left trying to work out what the school will actually cost.
Most of it is nobody’s job
In my experience, most confusing messages are assembled in pieces. Legal adds a sentence to protect the organization. The billing system prints the codes it was set up to print. Someone reuses last year’s template because it was already approved. Marketing adds a warm greeting at the top. Each piece makes sense to the person who added it, and nobody reads the whole thing the way the customer will.
That’s how the same organization can be patient on the phone and baffling on paper. The people are trying, but the message itself has no owner.
It’s also why the confusion lasts. The team that writes a letter rarely answers the calls it causes. The cost turns up somewhere else: the call center, the billing office, the staff who handle appeals. A letter can pass every internal review and still leave a tired person wondering what to do next.
The legal scholar Cass Sunstein, co-author of Nudge, has a name for the paperwork, waiting, and needless hurdles that keep people from getting things done: sludge.
Who benefits, and who pays?
One useful question is who benefits from the confusion, and who pays for it. That won’t tell you for certain whether anyone intended it. But it can help explain why it sticks around.
If people give up trying to cancel a subscription and get charged for another month, the company benefits from the difficulty, whether or not anyone planned it. And once an organization knows what’s happening, has a reasonable way to fix it, and leaves it alone, the claim that nobody intended the result becomes less convincing.
In other cases, the organization pays for its own confusion. People call, forms come back incomplete, complaints pile up, and staff spend hours explaining things the original message should have explained. Often the costs are scattered across departments, so nobody sees the whole bill.
And sometimes both things are true. A confusing process may save money in one part of an organization while creating work in another. The line between deliberate and accidental confusion is rarely clean. What keeps the confusion in place is some mix of incentives, habits, and decisions, including the decision to leave things as they are.
So why not fix it?
If confusion costs an organization money and goodwill, fixing it should be an easy sell. It rarely is, because a better sentence is usually only part of the fix. The rest is a set of decisions nobody has been asked to make.
Someone has to settle what the organization actually means: the real deadline, the real amount, what happens if the person does nothing. Someone has to own the whole message, with enough authority to resolve disagreements between legal, policy, billing, and the people who handle the calls. And someone has to check what happens after the message goes out: whether people understand it, follow through, appeal for the right reasons, or give up.
Sometimes the problem goes deeper than the writing. The amount may be wrong in the billing system, or the process itself may be needlessly difficult. A clearer paragraph won’t fix either one, though looking closely at the message is often how an organization discovers that something else needs fixing.
The same problem is now turning up in AI-generated messages. A chatbot given the wrong explanations, or no clear limits on what it may say, can repeat an organization’s confusion faster, and more politely, than any letter.
That’s part of the work I call Voice Governance: agreeing on what the organization means, deciding who’s responsible for saying it, and checking whether the person receiving the message can actually use it.
What fixing it gets you
An organization that does this work becomes easier to deal with. People notice when a bill tells them what they owe and when it’s due, when a denial says what they can do next, and when a chatbot hands a question to a person instead of guessing.
That’s what friendlier means in practice. Most people would trade the warm greeting at the top of a letter for a clear answer in the middle of it.
The organization benefits, too. Every call that doesn’t need to happen frees someone to help with a problem a letter can’t solve. And when people can complete an application, understand a decision, or challenge an error without getting lost, the organization is doing its job better.
The point
So, are organizations confusing on purpose? Sometimes. Sometimes they’ve inherited a mess nobody owns. And sometimes they’ve learned to live with confusion because the people who pay for it aren’t the people who could change it.
Whatever started the confusion, someone can take responsibility for ending it. Find the messages people keep calling about. Read them as a recipient would. Decide what needs to change, and who has the authority to change it.
The person sitting through that second hold message probably doesn’t care whether anyone meant to make things difficult. They’d just like to know what they owe. §
This is the fourth essay in the Voice Governance framework. Also in the series: What Is Voice Governance? (July), The Permission Boundary (August), and Voice Literacy (September).