One of the most common mistakes organisations make when trying to improve content is assuming that the content itself is the thing that needs fixing.
Employees can't find information. The intranet feels cluttered. People continue raising support tickets for questions that already have documented answers. Pages become outdated. Search results are inconsistent. Before long, a project is commissioned to clean everything up. Sometimes that's exactly what's needed.
More often, content has simply become the most visible symptom of a deeper issue.
Over the years, some of the most valuable content design work I've done has had very little to do with writing, editing or publishing content. Instead, it has involved understanding the systems that shape how content is created, maintained and consumed in the first place.
Content governance, ownership structures, decision-making processes, organisational capability and ways of working all influence how effective content ultimately becomes. The page is rarely operating in isolation.
Looking beyond the page
A few years ago, I worked on an initiative aimed at improving how employees accessed HR information.
The presenting problem seemed straightforward. Employees couldn't find the information they needed and were regularly raising support tickets for questions that already had documented answers.
Like many organisations, the initial assumption was that the content itself needed improvement.
Yet once I started conducting a content audit, stakeholder interviews and user testing, it became clear that rewriting pages alone would not solve the problem.
The content had become the place where several organisational issues were colliding.
Content ownership was unclear. Different teams had developed their own publishing habits. The information architecture had evolved organically over time rather than being intentionally designed. There was no clear governance approach, no consistent review process and very little content design capability among the people responsible for maintaining employee-facing information.
Improving the content still mattered, but only as part of a broader solution.
Using principles similar to those outlined in our content design methodology we restructured content around genuine user needs rather than organisational structures. At the same time, we introduced governance practices, clarified ownership responsibilities and improved publisher capability.
What emerged was not simply a collection of better pages.
It was a more sustainable content ecosystem supported by standards, governance and shared ways of working.
When the tool gets blamed
I encountered a similar pattern in a completely different environment while working for an independent television production company.
The team was using a spreadsheet to manage incoming book, film and television submissions, and frustration with the process was growing. Information was difficult to track, project history was inconsistent and decision-making lacked transparency.
Understandably, people had concluded that the spreadsheet was the problem. In reality, the spreadsheet was doing exactly what it had been designed to do. The issue was that the organisation had outgrown the process surrounding it.
There was no consistent approach to evaluating opportunities, capturing organisational knowledge or creating visibility of how decisions were made. Important context existed in conversations, inboxes and individual memories rather than within a shared system.
Introducing a new tool without addressing those issues would simply have created a more sophisticated version of the same problem.
Before designing a solution, I spent time understanding how opportunities entered the organisation, how they moved through assessment and how decisions were actually being made.
Only then did it make sense to redesign the workflow, introduce governance and develop a new SharePoint and Microsoft 365 solution that supported the way people needed to work.
The technology succeeded because the underlying process was redesigned alongside it.
Content reflects the system around it
These projects took place in very different environments, but they shared a common lesson.
When content isn't working, it's often because something around the content isn't working.
Poor content may be a symptom of weak content governance. Confusing content may reflect unclear ownership. Outdated content may indicate capability gaps or a lack of maintenance processes.
Inconsistent content can reveal competing priorities, organisational silos or fragmented decision-making.
Low adoption of digital platforms can signal broader technology adoption and change management challenges.
Poor search experiences often point to problems with searchability, information architecture or content ownership rather than search technology itself.
Why this matters for employee self-service
Many organisations invest heavily in intranets, knowledge bases and digital workplace tools hoping to improve employee self-service.
Yet self-service succeeds only when employees can quickly find trusted information, understand what action to take and complete tasks with minimal effort.
When governance is weak, ownership is unclear or information is organised around internal structures rather than user needs, self-service breaks down.
The result is usually more support tickets, lower trust in content and greater reliance on subject matter experts.
Improving self-service often starts with improving the systems surrounding the content rather than the content itself.
The bigger opportunity
That's one of the reasons I find content design so interesting. Content sits at the intersection of people, process and technology.
It exposes the hidden assumptions and organisational structures that shape employee experiences every day. When we focus exclusively on the words on a page, we risk treating the symptom.
When we take the time to understand the broader system, we create opportunities to improve not only the content, but the experience people have when interacting with it.
And in my experience, that's where the most meaningful and lasting improvements tend to come from.