286: The Gifts of Reading
Dear friends
Before we get to this week’s letter, a quick reminder of last week’s announcement that for this year, we will have 8 weeks of letters, followed by a 4-week production break. I am creating space for advancing deep work and longer form writing. The first production break starts next week. Our next letter will land on 3 May.
Given this direction of travel, it seems appropriate that we end this cycle reflecting on the gifts of reading.
Many of you have “Chief” or “Head of” in your professional title. Several of you have founded and built businesses of significance and you all occupy positions of influence.
With that reader profile you might expect that the year’s most popular newsletters would be rooted in the pragmatics of profit and loss, of strategy and management. They’re not. It is those about being lost and self-doubt and hope and freedom that resonated the most, saying that beneath the titles and the jobs we all grapple with being human: a powerful reminder that strategy cannot be separated from soul and self.
Today’s letter extends that theme. It draws from a beautiful collection of essays, The Gifts of Reading.
In the title essay, Robert Macfarlane quotes Lewis Hyde, “Great art offers us images by which to imagine our lives [and] once the imagination has been awakened it is procreative: through it we can give more than we are given, say more than we had to say”.
Reading both enriches us in the moment and expands our creative and critical capabilities; we know more and can see and do more.
Many of us read for knowledge and pleasure, few of us read with the realisation that the act of reading improves our cognitive capabilities for multiple contexts. Even fewer of us, especially in professional contexts, read together and so miss the opportunity to develop shared language, understanding and even modes of discussion and disagreement.
Our world is ever faster, more complex and uncertain. It is harder to discern the optimal paths of action. Indeed, we are so often rushing to present the answer that we haven’t even paused to clarify the question.
Who has time to figure out what the problem really is? We must solve it. If not now, then yesterday.
Compounding it, across the world, CEOs are issuing ‘must-use AI’ edicts and are scrambling to find ways to identify the Luddites who resist.
Yet we know that the evolving tools are both incredibly powerful and have flaws. Without critical engagement, if the approach is ‘press enter, press send’, the results can quickly gum up an organisation.
A recent HBR article declared AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity, noting that 40% of US employees they’d surveyed had encountered “workslop” – defined as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task” – in the last month.
Requiring rework, it creates friction – figuring out what is useful, sifting fact from fantasy – and erodes trust (42% of surveyed workslop recipients saw the senders as less trustworthy, and 37% saw them as less intelligent – a significant drag on deep collaboration).
The technology presents a delicious conundrum: in certain instances, it is excellent, and it hallucinates. Both are true. It is most powerful when its users have existing mental models and the capacity for complexity to allow for contextually aware collaboration.
It creates a compelling requirement: we, the users, must become even more skilled at understanding context, at critical thinking, at reading into the silences, at spotting gaps and overly neat conclusions, at having finely tuned ‘bs’ detectors.
The technology can help us move quicker. Its optimal use also requires moving slowly with deep concentration and wide context understanding.
And, even as it improves, the world’s complexity remains – we will still need multiple lenses to understand the overwhelming diversity of signs we see.
Parallel to this, one of the most powerful tools for context building and deep-thinking capability – systematic, sustained reading – is in decline.
The evidence turns up in articles like What Phones Are Doing to Reading, What’s Happening to Reading? And Is the Decline of Reading Poisoning Our Politics? (with the cautionary subtitle – Your Brain Isn’t What it Used to Be).
One telling data point: in 2022, 48.5% of U.S. adults read any book for pleasure, down from 61% in 1992 (National Endowment for the Arts’ Survey of Public Participation in the Arts).
Others shrug their shoulders: reading continues, they say, just differently, spread across multiple formats and in a more fragmented fashion.
The book-readers camp exclaims, “Precisely!”
Cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf estimates people encounter roughly 100,000 words per day across digital platforms — but in short, skimmed bursts rather than sustained engagement.
In Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Wolf synthesizes neuroscience research to argue that digital skimming does not exercise the brain’s “deep reading circuit,” which enables critical analysis, inference, empathy, and reflection, and requires slow, sustained practice to develop and maintain. Only sustained reading creates the necessary friction for the pathways to deepen and strengthen.
Several studies show decline in attention, reduced comprehension and recall from onscreen reading and increased context switching (which has its own cost).
Workplaces might consider following schools: ban phones and increase attention.
The research is not 100% conclusive, not all the negative results are replicated in follow-on studies. Still, as Columbia Business School strategist, Rita McGrath reminds us, “Snow melts from the edges” – often evidence arrives when it is too late to respond.
We must pay attention to faint signals. I suspect that the threats are the more accurate story, certainly my clients’ experiences mirror the risks – something is changing, even if we don’t yet know how much.
Simply put: At the moment that we require enhanced critical thinking, many of us are abandoning the habits that sustain it.
By implication, those of us that maintain or amplify our ability to discern and manage complexity, to respond rather than react, will be advantaged.
Organisations that think better will perform better.
Charlie Munger, co-founder of Berkshire Hathaway, advocates that decision-makers need 80–90 mental models – a latticework of mental models – drawn from psychology, economics, biology, physics, history, and that reading widely across disciplines is how you build them.
Munger is echoed by political scientist, Phillip Tetlock’s research: the best crisis decision-makers and forecasters are comfortable with integrative complexity. They draw on and synthesize diverse sources of information, intentionally cultivating the capacity to differentiate among multiple perspectives, and integrating them into coherent judgments.
Sustained nonfiction reading across multiple disciplines builds the mental maps that make novel situations more comprehensible. Research also shows that consistent reading increases neurological connections and that habitual fiction reading is associated with stronger empathy and social intelligence. Given all that, we must conclude that to lead, we must read.
Three radically different authors – William Blake, Pico Iyer and Verne Harnish – from across two centuries affirm this instinct.
Blake’s observation, “As a man is, so he sees” is echoed by Iyer, in his essay, The Best Conversations of My Life, one’s “understanding (of) the outer world is only as rich as one’s command of the inner world” and in a radically different context, Entrepreneurs Organisation founder Harnish writes, “All great business leaders know one thing — nothing interesting can come out of your brain that you don’t put in first. Having a natural curiosity and thirst for learning separates the good from the great in our experience.”
Reading enriches.
You deepen contextual understanding, you understand people better and you think better. It’s no wonder books get banned. They’re dangerous things.
Best wishes
Karl
PS: For the past year, I have brought executive teams together for structured reading and conversation to strengthen their collective capacity for integrative complexity. The format is simple: curated materials (book chapters, articles, case studies, fiction, non-fiction, occasionally poetry) followed by facilitated dialogue. No presentations. No deliverables. No problem-solving. Just rigorous first principles conversation, about how to think better, building the latticework for clearer reflection and decision-making. You can find out more about The Pathway here. Email me if you’d like a conversation to create a pathway for your team.