When we’re writing documentation for our clients, we often have to reference third-party enterprise docs. We’ll ask an AI tool to surface the relevant pages, then we skim the snippets, click through, and verify what’s actually there.
Too often, that verification feels like wading into a bureaucratic swamp. The cursor blinks. The headers sprawl. Somewhere inside the paragraph, I’m supposed to find the thing I came for, but first, there’s a lecture.
A wall of context rises in front of me:
A verbose introduction that gestures toward value but never lands on it
A dense list of “considerations,” where every bullet hedges against the last
Steps that multiply before my eyes, each containing three more steps nested inside
Sentences that start as guidance and end as philosophy or apology or both
By the second scroll, I’ve forgotten what I was even trying to confirm.
By the third, I’m not sure if I’m still the target audience or an accidental auditor.
If you felt your attention drift just now, that’s the point.
Sometimes I joke that I need a continuing-education Certificate in Enterprise-Documentation Comprehension.
I know smart people have written these articles: engineers, product managers. They understand exactly how everything fits together.
And that’s the problem. When you understand everything, you forget what it feels like to understand nothing. You write down everything you know, exhaustively. But there is a cost to that kind of completeness.
The Cost of Completeness
Enterprise documentation often tries to educate before it orients. It explains every variable, dependency, and exception before the user has taken the first action.
The result is not comprehension. It is cognitive overload.
When users encounter more detail than their current goal requires, they begin to lose track of relevance. Each paragraph competes for attention, and the effort of deciding what to ignore becomes its own form of confusion.
Research supports this. A 2024 scoping review on information overload found that excessive detail and low-relevance information increase cognitive strain, slow comprehension, and degrade decision quality. Enterprise documentation often mistakes completeness for clarity. What begins as a gesture of thoroughness becomes a barrier to understanding.
The irony is that this overload rarely comes from neglect. It comes from mastery, from people who know too much and care too deeply.
When Experts Confuse Mastery with Mercy
Product managers and engineers write the way they think. They trace dependencies, qualify exceptions, and defend completeness. Their instincts are architectural, not narrative. They see the entire system at once and assume that understanding the whole will make every part clearer.
They want to protect users from confusion, so they explain everything that might ever go wrong. They want to be transparent, responsible, and helpful. They want to prove they have considered every path the user could take. In their eyes, this is mercy.
Inside many organizations, completeness is rewarded. A missing note about a configuration flag or an unmentioned permission setting can trigger another meeting or a support escalation. The unspoken lesson is clear: cover every scenario, or risk being blamed for what you left out.
Over time, experts begin to protect themselves as much as their users. Every sentence becomes a small act of self-defense. In an expert’s mind, if something breaks, at least the documentation mentioned it somewhere.
The result isn’t documentation that protects users. It buries them instead, overwhelming action and eroding the very clarity it meant to provide.
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