If They Can't Explain It, They Won't Use It: The Case for the Elevator Test

Walk any floor of a mid-sized American company and ask employees a deceptively simple question: what does the platform you log into every morning actually do? In many organizations, the answers are revealing. 'It's the HR thing.' 'Where we do the expense reports.' 'Something with the cloud, I think.'

These aren't careless people. They are competent professionals who have learned to operate software the way drivers operate cars — pressing the buttons that work, ignoring the ones that don't, with no mental model of what's under the hood. And that gap between usage and understanding is where software ROI quietly leaks out of the enterprise.

Why Understanding Is an Adoption Problem

The conventional response to low adoption is more training: another webinar, another quick-reference guide, another mandatory e-learning module. But training addresses mechanics, not meaning. An employee who completes training knows which buttons to press. An employee who understands the platform knows why they'd press a different one.

Consider three everyday scenarios:

• In finance, an analyst duplicates work in a spreadsheet because she doesn't realize the ERP's reporting module can produce the same reconciliation automatically. The capability was purchased; the understanding wasn't.
• In HR, managers bypass the self-service portal and route every request through the HR generalist because they don't grasp which workflows the portal handles. The generalist becomes a bottleneck, and the tool becomes shelfware.
• In sales, reps skip the CRM's pipeline forecasting and keep a private tracker, unaware that the platform's forecast logic depends on the data they're not entering. Leadership then makes decisions on incomplete pipelines and blames the software.

In each case, the failure isn't technical. It's narrative. Nobody ever gave these employees a thirty-second explanation of what the system is for.

Running the Elevator Test

The audit itself is almost embarrassingly simple. Select a platform. Ask a random sample of its daily users — across departments and seniority — to answer one question: in one or two sentences, what does this tool do for you, and what would you lose without it?

Score the results against three thresholds:

• Below 40 percent coherent answers: the platform has a clarity crisis. Expect shadow workarounds, support ticket volume, and abandoned features.
• 40 to 70 percent: the platform works for those who were onboarded well and fails everyone hired after. Check whether knowledge lives in people rather than processes.
• Above 70 percent: protect it. Whatever onboarding and communication produced this clarity is an asset worth documenting before turnover erases it.

The test costs nothing and takes an afternoon. What it reveals is usually worth more than the next training line item.

Clarity-First Onboarding Beats Training Budgets

Organizations that score well share a habit: they lead with the story, not the software. Their onboarding answers three questions in the first week — what this platform does, what it replaces, and what changes for your specific role. They name their systems in plain language rather than acronyms. They publish a one-page 'what lives where' map so employees stop guessing which tool handles which task.

Most importantly, they treat internal communication as part of the software investment, not an afterthought. A platform that costs seven figures and gets a two-paragraph launch email has a communication budget problem, not an adoption problem.

The economics are hard to argue with. Training programs are recurring costs that decay with every new hire and every reorganization. Clarity, once established — in onboarding materials, in role-based quick guides, in the way leaders talk about the stack — compounds. It survives turnover. It scales with growth.

Before the next budget cycle funds another round of training, try the cheaper intervention first. Ask your people what the software does. Their answers will tell you exactly where the ROI is going — and how much of it is recoverable with nothing more than a well-told story.