Are you being too neutral?
Bri Williams
I think we need to clear something up.
👉 Providing information isn’t the same as helping someone decide.
Too often, those two roles get blurred.
The result?
Comms and presentations that “inform” but don’t have any impact.
People either ignore them, or ask for more time or more detail before slowly fading away.
So a useful question to ask is:
- Am I here to inform or am I here to help a decision get made?
Because they require different things.
When you’re informing, you can stay neutral.
But when you’re helping someone decide, you have to make the trade-offs visible.
- What does one option give them that the other doesn’t?
- What are they giving up either way?
Comms become ineffective when we misunderstand our role.
We think it’s a virtue to have no voice.
But often, we’re just shifting the burden onto someone else – leaving them to do the hardest part on their own.
And that’s usually where decisions stall.

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