My Thoughts
Why Most "Advanced" Communication Training is Just Fancy Nonsense (And What Actually Works)
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The woman sitting across from me in the boardroom had all the right qualifications. MBA from Melbourne Business School, fifteen years at McKinsey, and she'd just completed a three-day "Advanced Communication Mastery" program that cost her company $8,000.
She couldn't explain her project proposal in plain English to save her life.
This was back in 2019, and I was consulting for a mid-tier construction firm in Brisbane. They'd sent half their leadership team through this boutique communication program—you know the type, lots of buzz words about "authentic presence" and "transformational dialogue." The facilitator probably wore expensive sneakers and used phrases like "let's unpack that."
Here's the thing about advanced communication training that nobody wants to admit: most of it's designed to make smart people feel cleverer, not actually communicate better.
I've been in this game for seventeen years now. Started as a sparky who couldn't string two sentences together in front of more than three people, ended up running communication workshops for ASX200 companies. And the dirty secret is that 73% of executives who complete "advanced" programs actually get worse at connecting with their teams.
That's not a typo. Worse.
Why? Because advanced communication training often teaches people to talk like consultants when they should be talking like humans.
The Advanced Communication Trap
The problem starts with the word "advanced." It suggests you've graduated beyond basic human connection into some rarefied realm of communication artistry. Like you're Neo learning kung fu, but for PowerPoint presentations.
Reality check: the most powerful communicators I know—CEOs who've built billion-dollar companies, politicians who win elections, teachers who actually change lives—they all master the fundamentals obsessively. They don't move beyond basics; they go deeper into them.
Consider Gina Rinehart. Love her or hate her business approach, when she speaks publicly, she's crystal clear about what she wants and why. No fancy frameworks. No seven-step methodologies. Just directness that cuts through noise.
Same with Alan Joyce during his time at Qantas. Whether you agreed with his decisions or not, you always knew exactly where he stood. That's not advanced technique—that's mastery of clarity.
But here's where most training programs get it wrong. They teach complexity when simplicity is the goal.
I had a client once—let's call him David from a major Perth mining company—who came to me after completing an "Executive Presence and Persuasion Mastery" course. David was brilliant. Genuinely one of the smartest operations managers I'd ever met. But after his training, he'd started every conversation with something called "contextual framing" and ended with "alignment verification."
His team thought he'd lost his mind.
The course had taught him a six-stage communication model. Six stages! For a conversation! It was like trying to make a cup of tea using a chemistry set.
What Actually Constitutes Advanced Communication
Real advanced communication isn't about technique—it's about courage.
The courage to be boring when boring is what's needed. The courage to repeat yourself until everyone understands. The courage to admit when you don't know something. The courage to have the difficult conversation instead of dancing around it with sophisticated language.
I learned this the hard way during a project in Adelaide, probably 2016 or 2017. I was brought in to help a manufacturing company communicate better with their union representatives. The previous consultant had trained management in "interest-based negotiation dialogue" and "empathetic mirroring techniques."
The union guys took one look at this corporate speak and basically told them to get stuffed.
My approach? I made the managers talk like human beings. No frameworks. No models. Just: "Here's what we need, here's why we need it, here's what we can offer in return, what do you think?"
Problem solved in three weeks.
This is what actual advanced communication looks like:
Radical clarity over clever phrasing. If your grandmother wouldn't understand your explanation, it's not advanced—it's pretentious.
Emotional honesty over diplomatic language. Sometimes you need to say "This isn't working" instead of "We're experiencing some challenges in our current approach."
Questions over statements. The most sophisticated communicators I know ask more questions than they answer. Not because they don't know—because they understand that communication is about connection, not performance.
The Three Things They Don't Teach in Advanced Programs
First: Silence is a communication tool. Most training focuses on what to say and how to say it. Almost none teaches when to shut up. I've seen million-dollar deals saved by someone smart enough to stop talking after making their point.
Second: Context matters more than content. You can have the most elegant message in the world, but if you deliver it at the wrong time, in the wrong place, to the wrong person, it's worthless. I once watched a brilliant product manager kill a project by giving a perfect presentation to the CFO right after he'd learned about a budget overrun in another division. Timing, people. It's everything.
Third: Your audience's attention is finite. This sounds obvious, but watch any "advanced" communicator in action and they'll often try to cover seventeen different points in a single conversation. The human brain can hold about three key concepts at once. Maybe four if you're lucky. Everything else is just noise.
Actually, let me expand on that attention thing because it drives me mental.
I was working with a tech startup in Melbourne—amazing product, smart people, funding secured. Their CEO had just finished some executive communication program and decided every team meeting needed to follow this elaborate structure: opening context, stakeholder mapping, objective clarification, progress review, barrier identification, solution brainstorming, next steps alignment, and closing commitment verification.
Eight bloody stages for a fifteen-minute stand-up meeting!
Within a month, half the team was finding excuses to skip meetings. The ones who showed up were checking their phones. Productivity tanked because nobody could remember what they were supposed to be doing after sitting through the "process."
I suggested they try this: "What did you do yesterday, what are you doing today, what's blocking you?" Three questions. Same information. Meeting time cut from forty-five minutes to eight.
The CEO initially resisted because it seemed too "basic" for a sophisticated organisation.
That's the trap right there. Sophistication isn't complexity—it's elegance through simplicity.
When Advanced Techniques Actually Work
Don't get me wrong. There are some genuinely useful advanced concepts. But they're not what most programs teach.
Strategic ambiguity, for instance. Sometimes you deliberately need to be unclear because premature clarity would cause problems. If you're negotiating with multiple suppliers and don't want to show your hand, or managing change when the full plan isn't ready for announcement. This requires real skill.
Conversational layering is another one. The ability to have multiple conversations simultaneously—the surface conversation everyone can hear, and the subtext that only your intended audience understands. Politicians use this constantly, but so do good managers dealing with sensitive team dynamics.
Emotional pre-loading. Understanding how to prepare someone emotionally for difficult information so they can actually process it instead of just reacting. This isn't manipulation—it's compassion.
But here's the kicker: you can't learn these skills in a training room. They require practice in real situations with real consequences.
I made this mistake myself early in my career. Spent a fortune on communication courses, collected certificates, learned all the latest models. But I was still terrible at the one thing that mattered most: connecting with people.
The breakthrough came during a project with a family business in regional Queensland. Five generations, about forty employees, and they were tearing themselves apart over succession planning. All my fancy training was useless because these people needed honesty, not technique.
So I ditched the frameworks and just started asking simple questions: "What scares you about this decision? What do you need to feel confident? What's one thing that absolutely has to happen?"
That's when I learned that emotional intelligence for managers isn't about reading micro-expressions or using empathy statements. It's about creating space for people to tell you what they actually need.
The Reality Check Nobody Wants to Hear
Most communication problems aren't communication problems—they're clarity problems.
People don't struggle to communicate complex ideas because they lack advanced techniques. They struggle because they haven't done the hard work of figuring out what they actually want to say.
Before you learn how to say something better, you need to know what you're trying to achieve.
This seems obvious, but I'd estimate that 60% of the communication challenges I see in organisations stem from people trying to communicate unclear thinking. No amount of advanced technique can fix fuzzy objectives.
It's like trying to give someone directions when you don't know where you're going. You can use the most sophisticated GPS app in the world, but if you haven't decided on a destination, you're just going to confuse everyone.
What To Do Instead
If you want to genuinely improve your communication—and I mean really improve it, not just feel like you have—focus on these three things:
Get brutally clear about your intent. Before every important conversation, ask yourself: What specific outcome do I want? What does success look like? What's the minimum this person needs to understand?
Practice with feedback. Find someone who'll tell you the truth about how you come across. Not a coach who's paid to be encouraging—someone who has to work with you and will benefit from your improvement.
Study the masters, not the methods. Watch how genuinely effective communicators actually behave. I don't mean TED talk speakers or motivational trainers. I mean people who consistently get results through communication. Notice what they do, not what they say about what they do.
The truth about advanced communication is that it's not advanced at all. It's the basics done with precision, courage, and genuine care for the person you're talking to. Everything else is just expensive distraction.
And if that sounds too simple, well... that's probably why it works.
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