I studied English Literature at university, so I accept that I probably pay more attention to the meaning behind words than the average person. However, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that we have a literacy problem that has very little to do with whether people can actually read.
My latest piece of evidence is Sam Fender and Olivia Dean’s Rein Me In.
It’s currently all over social media, including a surprising number of wedding and relationship videos. I completely understand why if you’ve only listened to approximately ten seconds of it. It sounds romantic, the chorus is catchy and Sam Fender and Olivia Dean sound lovely singing it together.
Unfortunately, if you listen to the song, it’s essentially about an emotionally distant man who goes around telling everyone but the person he was in a relationship with about how he’s “F-ed it all up”. Nothing says romance like “all my memories of you ring like tinnitus.”
People accidentally using a questionable song over their wedding videos isn’t a national emergency. I do, however, think it’s a brilliant example of how accustomed we’ve become to consuming the surface level of something and deciding that we understand the whole thing.
We read the headline but not the article. We watch the clip but not the interview. We see a statistic in a social media post without asking where it came from, and increasingly we can ask AI to summarise something for us without ever looking at the original information ourselves.
There’s more information available to us than at any other point in history, but we’re getting worse at understanding it.
Being able to read something doesn’t mean you’ve understood it
Earlier this year, I wrote about how we’ve lost the art of nuance in marketing. A lot of that article focused on the responsibility businesses have to communicate clearly because people skim, context gets lost and social media platforms naturally favour content that can be understood and reacted to quickly.
The more I’ve thought about it since, the more I think there’s another side to the problem.
We’ve become incredibly passive consumers of information.
If something looks authoritative, sounds convincing or confirms something we already believe, how often do we actually investigate it further?
You can see this every day online… Someone shares an article based entirely on the headline, despite the article itself making a much more qualified argument. A short clip from a podcast starts circulating without the conversation that came before or after it. A statistic gets repeated so many times that eventually nobody seems particularly concerned with finding out where it originally came from.
Being able to access information isn't the same as being able to interpret it.
Context changes what something means
One of the things I loved about studying English Literature was realising how much you can miss when you read something entirely at face value.
Jane Austen is an obvious example. Her novels are frequently reduced to romances about women finding husbands, which is technically an accurate description of quite a lot of the plot, but it’s also a remarkably limited interpretation of what she was writing about.
Marriage in Austen’s world wasn't simply romantic. It was financial, social and, particularly for women, closely connected to security and status. Once you understand the laws, class structures, expectations and economic realities surrounding the characters, decisions that might look ridiculous through a modern lens suddenly have considerably more meaning.
The relationships give Austen a way to explore money, inheritance, class, reputation, gender and power, often with far more criticism and humour than you’ll notice if you’re simply waiting for Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy to get together.
I think we’re becoming increasingly bad at applying that same contextual thinking to the information we consume today.
There’s a strange tendency to encounter something written, said or created in a completely different period and immediately judge it against our current values, without making much effort to understand the world it came from.
That doesn't mean historical ideas should be protected from criticism because “things were different then”. Understanding something and agreeing with it are completely different exercises.
But surely understanding should come first.
The same applies when you walk into a business or industry you don't know particularly well.
Something can look outdated, inefficient or completely illogical from the outside, but there’s usually a reason it exists. That reason might no longer be a good one, and the business may absolutely need to change, but understanding how it got there gives you a much better chance of changing it successfully.
I think this is particularly important with heritage businesses and companies that have been operating successfully for decades. They can sometimes need more support when transitioning into a new way of working, communicating or marketing because you aren't starting with a blank sheet of paper. There are existing customers, employees, relationships, processes, reputations and often generations of history sitting behind what you see today.
Walking in and immediately dismissing all of that as old fashioned is about as useful as reading Austen and deciding everyone should simply stop worrying about marriage and get a job.
You’re applying the rules of one world to another without understanding how it works.
Good strategy requires you to understand the context first. You can then decide what should be protected, what needs to evolve and what genuinely has no place in where the business is going next.
Otherwise, you risk changing things you never properly understood in the first place.
We’re becoming very good at proving ourselves right
Politics is perhaps the most obvious example of what happens when we lose that curiosity.
People can become incredibly attached to political parties while knowing surprisingly little about the policies they’re actually defending. I find it fascinating how many people will passionately argue for or against a party when they haven't read its manifesto, looked properly at the policy in question or investigated the evidence being used to support it.
Politics can become part of somebody’s identity, which makes changing your mind considerably harder. If you’ve decided that your side is right and the other side is wrong, every new piece of information arrives with a filter already attached to it.
We’re all susceptible to confirmation bias. It feels much more comfortable to find evidence that supports something we already believe than to deliberately look for information that might prove us wrong.
The problem is that social media has become extraordinarily good at helping us do exactly that.
Algorithms learn what keeps us interested. If you repeatedly engage with a particular political argument, worldview or type of content, you’re likely to see more of it. Engage with that and you’ll get more again. Eventually, you can find yourself surrounded by people, posts and opinions that make your view of the world appear far more universally accepted than it really is.
We can also be remarkably selective about which evidence deserves scrutiny. A study supporting our position is compelling research, while one challenging it suddenly needs its methodology interrogating. A politician we support changes their position and we understand the context; somebody on the other side does it and they’re a hypocrite.
The intellectually difficult thing is applying the same standard to information regardless of whether you like the conclusion.
Business leaders need to be able to do exactly that.
One of the most dangerous things you can do is become so emotionally attached to an idea, product, strategy or even the business itself that questioning it starts to feel like questioning you.
Founders are probably particularly susceptible to this because so much of their identity can become intertwined with what they've built. If somebody challenges the positioning, criticises the product or suggests that the way you've always done something needs to change, it can feel considerably more personal than it actually is.
That’s when you start looking for evidence that proves you were right rather than evidence that helps you make the right decision.
The ability to test your own ideas is incredibly important. If you believe something is true, actively look for what would disprove it. Listen properly when customers tell you something you weren't expecting. Pay attention when the data doesn't fit the story you had in your head. Let somebody intelligent challenge the strategy without treating disagreement as disloyalty.
Changing your mind when you receive better information isn't weakness or indecision but continuing with a bad decision because you've publicly committed to it is considerably more damaging.
You don't need to become emotionally detached from your business. I’d be concerned if you didn't care deeply about something you've spent years building. You do, however, need enough objectivity to separate what you want to be true from what the evidence is actually telling you.
The strongest ideas should survive being challenged.
Otherwise, we aren't really using information to make decisions, we’re collecting information to defend decisions we’ve already made.
We’re being trained to get to the point as quickly as possible
I’m certainly not going to argue against making information concise. I’ve built a career around taking complicated businesses and making what they do easier to understand, and anyone who works with me knows I have very little patience for using 500 words when 100 will do.
There is, however, a difference between making something clear and removing everything that requires thought.
Social media has spent years training us to expect information in increasingly small packages. We have short videos, carousels, headlines, snippets and captions competing for a few seconds of our attention before we move onto the next thing.
The media has adapted to the same environment because it has the same commercial problem. A headline has to earn the click, which means the most provocative interpretation of a story can become considerably more valuable than the most accurate one.
We then complain about clickbait while continuing to reward it with our attention.
None of this requires some grand conspiracy: If the commercial incentive is attention, businesses will naturally become very good at producing things that attract attention.
The problem comes when we start confusing the packaging with the information itself.
AI could make us considerably smarter, or considerably lazier
I use AI every day and think it’s one of the most useful technologies available to businesses, but I also think we need to be careful about what we decide to outsource to it.
There’s a big difference between outsourcing a task and outsourcing your thinking.
If I use AI to help me work through a report, identify relevant information, explain something complicated or challenge an idea, I can probably understand the subject faster than I would have done without it.
If I ask it to summarise the report into five bullets, never read the original and then repeat those bullets to somebody else, I haven't suddenly become knowledgeable about the subject.
I’ve just made it much easier to appear knowledgeable.
You can also use AI to reinforce exactly the same biases social media does. Ask leading questions, only challenge answers you dislike and keep reframing the conversation until you receive the conclusion you wanted, and you’ve effectively created a very sophisticated echo chamber.
I think that’s where people need to become much more conscious of how they use these tools. AI should help you interrogate information, rather than remove the need to interrogate it yourself.
Ask what you might be missing. Ask for the strongest argument against your position. Ask which assumptions you’re making. Ask where the evidence is weak, and then go and investigate the important parts yourself.
Used well, AI gives us more time to think but used badly, it gives us an incredibly efficient way to avoid thinking altogether.
The real commercial advantage is judgement
All of this ultimately comes back to judgement.
Businesses have never had access to more information. We can see customer behaviour in extraordinary detail, measure marketing performance almost instantly, access market research from anywhere in the world and use technology to analyse enormous amounts of information in seconds.
Yet more information doesn't automatically produce better decisions.
A competitor having more followers doesn't mean their marketing is better. A campaign generating more engagement doesn't necessarily mean it contributed more to the business. Website traffic increasing doesn't tell you whether the right people visited, and a market growing rapidly doesn't automatically mean entering it is a good decision.
The numbers might be completely accurate. Your interpretation of them can still be wrong.
I wrote recently about businesses chasing attention rather than choosing intention, and I think the two problems are closely connected. We’re attracted to information that gives us an immediate answer because it removes the uncomfortable bit where we have to work out what something actually means.
That’s why context matters and it’s why your ideas need testing. It’s why understanding an industry properly matters before deciding how it needs to change, and why being able to recognise your own emotional attachment to a decision is part of good leadership.
Critical thinking sounds quite academic until you consider what happens without it.
You invest money in the wrong channel because you misunderstood the data. You change something customers valued because you never understood why it existed. You dismiss useful feedback because it contradicts your strategy. You follow a trend because everybody in your algorithm appears to be talking about it.
Those aren't literacy problems in the traditional sense but they are failures of comprehension and judgement, and they can become very expensive ones.
Curiosity is becoming a competitive advantage
For all my concern about where this is heading, I actually think there’s a fairly significant opportunity for businesses and individuals who go in the opposite direction.
When everyone else is skimming, read properly. If everyone is repeating the headline, open the article. When a statistic supports your argument perfectly, find out where it came from before you use it. If something doesn't make sense, investigate it.
You don't need to turn every decision into a six-month research project and there’s no prize for making simple things unnecessarily complicated. Good judgement is partly knowing which information deserves more of your attention.
I think that ability is going to become increasingly valuable because information itself is rapidly becoming commoditised. Almost anyone can access the same reports, ask the same AI tools questions and see the same content online.
The advantage comes from what you do with it.
Can you identify what’s relevant and what’s missing? Can you separate evidence from opinion and recognise when your own biases are affecting your interpretation? Can you understand an argument without necessarily agreeing with it? Can you change your mind when better information becomes available?
I don't think intelligence is demonstrated by knowing everything. There’s far more intelligence in being curious enough to recognise when your current understanding might be incomplete, and confident enough to investigate it rather than immediately defending what you already believe.
We have access to an extraordinary amount of information and technology that can help us understand more about the world than any generation before us.
It would be slightly ridiculous if we used all of that capability to become less curious.
And if nothing else, please listen to the whole song and maybe look at the lyrics before you use it for your first dance.