One Memo, Multiple Realities: Why the Disney Layoff Email Felt Confusing
- Apr 30
- 6 min read
Layoffs are one of the most challenging moments for any organization. Not just operationally, but emotionally. They test leadership judgment, company culture, and the trust employees place in both.
How a company communicates during these times can either mitigate the impact or exacerbate uncertainty and fear.
Recently, The Walt Disney Company shared a memo with employees about upcoming layoffs. To the writer, it read exactly like what modern corporate communication has come to look like: calm, empathetic, measured, and carefully constructed. Yet, for many, the reaction was the same: it felt off.
Here's why...
This piece is about why that happens. Not just with Disney's memo specifically, but with a structural failure that runs through most corporate communication at scale. It's about what context switching does to a message.
The Invisible Problem No One Names
Most teams, when confronted with a message that isn't landing, assume a wording problem.
They'll say: "Maybe we need to simplify the language." Or: "Can we make this cleaner?" Or: "This sentence feels clunky — let's cut it down."
So they rewrite. And rewrite again. They swap long words for short ones. They run it through a readability checker. They take out the jargon. They add a human touch. They cut the third paragraph and restructured the fourth.
But the confusion still doesn't go away.
What Context Switching Means in Communication
In software and cognitive science, context switching refers to the cost of shifting attention between tasks or mental states. Every time you switch, there's a loading penalty — a moment where your brain has to reorient, re-establish what it was doing, and rebuild the frame it was operating within.
The same thing happens to readers when a piece of writing shifts its perspective without signalling the transition.
In a well-constructed message, the reader knows, at every moment, who is speaking, who is being spoken to, and what emotional register they're operating in. They don't have to think about this. It's transparent. The text does that work for them.
But in most corporate communication, especially the kind that serves multiple audiences at once, the perspective shifts constantly.
The Multi-Audience Problem
Here's the context that makes this worse: corporate communication at scale is almost never written for one audience. It's written for employees, leadership, legal, external partners, potential media observers, and sometimes all of these simultaneously.
And instead of designing for that reality, most teams try to blend everyone into a single message.
The result is a piece of communication that is constantly switching emotional lanes:
Empathy → Authority → Reassurance → Strategic Positioning → Compliance Language
Each shift creates a small but real cognitive cost. On its own, each cost is trivial. Accumulated across a memo of six or eight paragraphs, the effect is what psychologists sometimes call cognitive load — the sensation of working harder than you should have to, of the text requiring more of you than its apparent simplicity would suggest.
This is what creates the "something feels off" response. Not confusion about the meaning of individual sentences. Confusion about who the message is for — and by extension, what it's asking the reader to feel.
Let's take a closer look at Disney's Layoff memo
Here's the pattern that emerges when you map it out:
The memo opens in a genuinely personal register — direct, warm, addressed to a human being. Then within the same second paragraph, it makes two back-to-back switches: first into corporate strategy language ("unified enterprise marketing"), then into external/investor positioning language ("agile and technologically-enabled workforce"). The reader who is wondering am I losing my job? is suddenly navigating boardroom framing with no bridge.
The third paragraph is the most fractured. It starts in the impacted-employee register —> "I know this is hard" which is real and grounded. But it closes the same thought by pivoting to corporate resource language —> "how to more effectively manage our resources and reinvest in our businesses." That's the emotional whiplash in its sharpest form: a single paragraph that opens with human acknowledgement and ends with efficiency framing. Without a transition, the human moment gets absorbed by the corporate one.
The closing paragraph is doing something specific: it's written to signal stability outward — to leadership, to observers, to anyone reading this as a signal about company health. "I remain optimistic about where we're headed" is a line written for that audience. For an impacted employee still processing what they just read, it lands as a signal that the writer has already moved on.
What's missing is zero transition language between any of these shifts. Not a single "for those directly affected" or "from a company perspective" or "for those of you staying." Every switch is implicit, and the reader has to absorb and decode each one mid-sentence, often in a state of heightened anxiety and fragmented attention.
What It's Like to Read Inside That Confusion
Context switching in your memo, even on a good day, is made dramatically worse when you factor in people's Third space fragmented attention.
They're not reading in a quiet room, with full attention. They're reading on their phone while sitting in a car park, scrolling before a meeting starts.
When a message has a stable, consistent perspective, a distracted reader can still orient quickly. Even if they've absorbed half of it in chunks, the emotional register is consistent. They know where they stand.
But when a message constantly switches perspective, a distracted reader has nothing to anchor to. Each return to the text requires a fresh calibration: Who is this for again? Has anything changed since the last paragraph? Is this for someone else? That calibration, happening in conditions of partial attention, creates what reads as confusion.
Why Empathy Alone Won't Fix It
The most common response to all of this is a call for more humanity in the writing. "Sound more human," teams will say. "Add a line acknowledging how hard this is."
This is not wrong, exactly. But it's not the only solution.
Because the problem isn't that the message lacks empathy. Many of these memos are extraordinarily careful about empathy. The problem is that empathy in one paragraph followed by strategic positioning in the next, with no transition, doesn't feel like empathy. It feels like the appearance of empathy to get the reader to quickly move on.
Separation is the real fix
Clarity doesn't come from perfect wording. It comes from not forcing one message to do three jobs at once.
If your message feels confusing, don't look first at the sentences. Look at the perspective. Ask who is speaking, and who they're speaking to at every point in the text. Notice where that shifts without a signal. Notice where empathy and authority, and strategic positioning get blended into the same paragraph, expecting the reader to feel all three simultaneously.
Consider the structural alternative: instead of one blended memo trying to serve every audience, what would it look like to write distinct communications for distinct groups? More clarity about who you're speaking to, and when.
It might sound like more work, but it's more intentional work.
One message for impacted employees: direct, specific, practical, personal. What is happening? When? What support is available? Who to contact. What happens next? No strategic framing. No optimism about the future. Just clarity, delivered with dignity.
One message for remaining employees: explicitly addressing the unspoken question they're all asking. Acknowledging the disruption. Providing answers to job stability. Not rushing past the moment to future vision.
One message for external stakeholders: strategic context, company positioning, forward narrative. Appropriate for that audience, not transplanted into a message meant for people who just learned their colleagues are leaving.
Same facts. Different containers. No context switching.
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