Sarah L.M. felt the dry heat of the server room radiating against the back of her neck, a stark contrast to the 64-degree chill of the bullpen where she’d spent the last 44 minutes trying to make sense of a single wiki page. As an origami instructor by trade-someone who understands that a single degree of deviation in a mountain fold can ruin the structural integrity of a paper crane-she had expected IT to be a world of similar precision. Instead, she found herself staring at an internal document titled “Onboarding for Technical Users.”

The first paragraph was a linguistic car crash. It contained 14 acronyms that weren’t defined in the company glossary, two references to a legacy server that had apparently been decommissioned in 2004, and a broken link that led straight to a 404 error page.

Sarah took a deep breath, the kind of breath you take before trying to explain to a room of ten-year-olds that, no, you cannot just “glue” the paper if you rip it. She wasn’t just confused; she was being told, implicitly, that her confusion was a personal failure. After all, the document was for technical users. If she didn’t understand it, what did that say about her?

The Convenient Fiction

We’ve collectively hallucinated a persona-a stoic, hyper-intelligent polymath who doesn’t need context, doesn’t need clear syntax, and possesses an innate ability to “just figure it out.” It’s a convenient fiction. By labeling our audience as “technical,” we give ourselves a free pass to be lazy, cryptic, and occasionally outright hostile in our communication. We stop writing for people and start writing for a ghost.

I remember giving a presentation on this very topic last month to a room of 54 senior engineers. About halfway through, right as I was making a point about the “Curse of Knowledge,” I got a sudden, violent case of the hiccups.

There I was, an “expert” on communication, making rhythmic, involuntary gasping sounds into a high-gain microphone. It was humiliating, but it was also a reminder of the fundamental messiness of being human. We aren’t machines. We don’t ingest data via API calls; we interpret stories through the fog of our own exhaustion, our morning caffeine levels, and the distracting hum of the air conditioner. Yet, when we sit down to write documentation, we pretend our readers are as infallible as a compiler.

The Architecture of Assumptions

We assume the reader knows that “The Service” refers to the specific microservice managed by the London team, even though there are 24 other services running in the cluster. We assume they know the environment variables are stored in a hidden vault that requires a specific permission set not mentioned until page 84 of the security handbook. We write as if we are talking to ourselves, forgetting that the reader is often someone like Sarah-smart, capable, but currently standing in a dark room wondering why the “obvious” step isn’t working.

This is the central irony: the more “technical” a user is, the more they value their time. A truly expert engineer doesn’t want to spend 34 minutes decrypting a poorly written paragraph; they want the answer so they can get back to building. By obscuring the truth behind a wall of jargon, we aren’t respecting their intelligence-we are taxing their patience.

I’ve seen this play out in 104 different ways across a dozen different companies. The result is always the same: a culture of “tribal knowledge” where the only way to get anything done is to tap a veteran on the shoulder and ask, “Hey, what did the person who wrote this actually mean?” This creates a dependency loop that slows down every project and makes scaling a team nearly impossible. It’s a structural failure disguised as a documentation problem.

Instructions are Everything

In the world of origami, instructions are everything. If I tell a student to perform a “swash fold” without showing the entry points, I’ve failed as an instructor. The student hasn’t failed; I have. Technical writing should be held to the same standard. We need to stop assuming that “technical” means “mind-reader.”

We need to start providing the “base folds” of our systems-the definitions, the context, and the clear, linear paths that allow someone to build something complex without the whole thing collapsing in their hands.

When we talk about Knowledge Management, we often get bogged down in the tools. We argue about whether to use Markdown or a proprietary editor, whether to host on a local server or in the cloud. But the tool is secondary to the philosophy of the content. A platform like

ACTIVATORS-KMS.COM

represents a shift toward respecting the reader’s cognitive load. It’s about creating a space where information isn’t just stored, but actually accessible.

It recognizes that the most “technical” user in the world is still just a person who probably has 44 other things on their mind and doesn’t want to play detective just to find an IP address.

Actually, let’s be honest: I’ve been the person who wrote the bad documentation. I’ve been the one who thought, “They’ll know what I mean,” because I was too tired to write out the full path to the configuration file. It’s a form of gatekeeping, even if it’s unintentional. It’s a way of saying, “You must be this ‘technical’ to ride this ride.”

But that’s not how you build a resilient organization. You build it by making the path to mastery as clear as possible. You build it by realizing that clarity is a gift, not a crutch.

I once spent 124 minutes debugging a script that failed because a documentation writer used the word “directory” when they actually meant “symlink.” It was a small distinction that changed everything about how the permissions were handled. To the person who wrote it, the difference was “obvious.”

To me, at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday, it was a black hole that swallowed two hours of my life. That’s the real cost of the “technical user” myth. It’s not just “confusing” docs; it’s the cumulative loss of thousands of hours of human potential across an entire industry.

Designing for the Exhausted User

Sarah L.M. eventually found what she needed. It wasn’t in the “Technical User” guide. It was buried in a chat log from four months ago, where a developer had explained the process to a frustrated intern. That chat log-informal, messy, but honest-was more “technical” than the official wiki because it actually contained the truth. It didn’t try to impress the reader; it tried to help them.

We need to kill the “technical user.” Not the person, of course, but the persona. We need to start writing for the “exhausted user,” the “newly hired user,” the “user who has a screaming toddler in the background,” and the “user who just wants to do their job and go home.” When we write for the real version of people, we end up creating something that works for everyone. Even the experts. Especially the experts.

Because the truth is, everyone is a “non-technical user” when they encounter something new. Whether you’re learning a complex C++ library or trying to figure out how to fold a 14-sided polygon from a single sheet of paper, you need a starting point. You need someone to tell you where to put your thumbs. You need the instructions to be as clear as a bell, not because you’re “not technical,” but because life is complicated enough as it is.

I still have those hiccups occasionally, by the way. Not just during presentations, but when I’m trying to rush through a task without thinking. It’s a physical signal from my body that I need to slow down, breathe, and pay attention to the details. Maybe our documentation needs a similar signal. Maybe every time we write a sentence that assumes too much, we should feel a little hiccup in our brains. A reminder that on the other side of that screen is a real person, waiting for us to tell them the truth.

But in my experience, the most advanced systems are the ones that can be explained simply. A well-folded origami dragon looks incredibly complex, but if you follow the 44 steps correctly, it’s inevitable. It’s a sequence of simple actions that lead to a sophisticated result. Software should be the same. Documentation should be the map that guides the reader through those steps, not a riddle they have to solve before they can even pick up the paper.

Write for Sarah

So, the next time you sit down to document a process, or a piece of code, or a company policy, do me a favor. Forget about the “technical user.” Imagine you’re writing for Sarah. Imagine she’s had a long day, the server room is hot, and she just wants to get the fold right. Give her the acronyms. Give her the context. Check your links.

It won’t make you look less “technical.” It will just make you look like you know what you’re talking about. And in a world of 404s and tribal knowledge, that is the most technical skill of all.

What would happen to our productivity if we treated every reader’s time as if it were as valuable as our own? If we stopped using “technical” as a synonym for “I don’t have time to be clear”?

We might actually start finishing projects on time. We might even stop having to ask for documentation for the documentation. And maybe, just maybe, Sarah could get her work done and get back to teaching people how to turn a square of paper into something that can fly.