AI Is Learning to Read. Humans Are Forgetting How.

“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some time ago, I invited Karl-Martin Rammo to run a training session for our RS Aero sailors. A four-time Olympian—you might expect the most memorable lessons from someone like him to be advanced sail-trimming techniques or a secret for making the boat move a few tenths faster.

The following week, however, Karl-Martin asked me an entirely innocent question:

“Do you keep a training diary like Siim does?”

I don’t.

And, as good questions tend to do, it started bothering me.

I have sailed for most of my life. I train, I compete, and after each session I usually have a pretty good idea of what went well and what went wrong. At least, that is what I tell myself.

But do I write down what I wanted to achieve, what actually happened, what I learned, and what I will do differently next time?

No.

In elite sport, this is not seen as tedious reporting. Coaches of young Norwegian cross-country skiers have described how a training diary helps athletes develop independence, reflection, and curiosity about their own performance.

An athlete should not only know how many kilometres they covered. They must learn to ask: Why did this work? Why didn’t it work? What did I learn?

The coach’s ultimate goal is somewhat paradoxical: to develop an athlete who becomes increasingly capable of coaching themselves.

That thought stayed with me because, at work, we often call the exact same activity bureaucracy.

Write a weekly summary. Assess the status of your goals. Put your thoughts in writing before the meeting. Analyse a failure. Define the next step.

“Do I really have to write all of this down? I have actual work to do.”

Sound familiar?

But what if this is the work?

Jeff Bezos reached a similar conclusion at Amazon, although by a different route.

People do not arrive at important leadership meetings there with traditional PowerPoint presentations. Instead, they bring a narrative memo—often six pages long—which everyone reads silently at the beginning of the meeting.

Imagine the scene: a room full of very expensive executives sitting in silence and reading. Nobody is talking.

There is a highly practical reason for this strange ritual.

It is surprisingly easy to hide a confused idea on a slide: add an attractive graph, three bullet points, an arrow pointing upwards, and the words “Strategic Transformation Journey” at the bottom.

Now try expressing the same idea in six pages of writing so that another intelligent person can understand it. You will quickly discover whether you actually had an idea—or merely three bullet points.

A meeting should therefore not be the place where people begin to think.

It should be the place where people arrive having already thought, ready to challenge one another’s thinking.

At the same time, Bezos has spent years warning against processes that become goals in themselves and begin to replace results.

To me, that offers a useful definition of bureaucracy:

Bad bureaucracy replaces thinking. Good bureaucracy forces us to think.

The same logic appears in Christina Wodtke’s Radical Focus through a much smaller but powerful management ritual: the weekly status report.

Wodtke describes how her first instinct was to report everything the team had done during the week. The result was a long list of activities that successfully demonstrated how busy everyone had been.

Only one small question remained unanswered:

Did we move closer to our goal?

A good weekly summary forces us to step off the hamster wheel for a moment.

What did I promise to do? What actually happened? How did I move closer to the goal? What worked, what did not, and what did I learn? What will I do differently next week?

Status Report = Self-Coaching.

It is the same training diary Karl-Martin asked me about—except that some of us wear a suit instead of sportswear.

You do not write a status report so that your manager can tick a box. You write it so that, once a week, you can look at yourself honestly.

Sometimes that feels good. Sometimes slightly less so.

But the status report has another interesting quality.

If you read your team members’ updates every week, you do not need to be an AI system or a McKinsey consultant to develop a fairly accurate understanding, after three or four weeks, of where things are heading.

Are the goals likely to be achieved? Are the desired outcomes behind those goals beginning to materialise? Or are we producing increasingly professional explanations, week after week, for why we have not quite managed it yet?

Results do not suddenly appear in an Excel spreadsheet on the final day of the quarter.

They reveal themselves much earlier—in people’s choices, priorities, experiments, speed of learning, and the things they write about week after week.

When confidence in achieving a goal declines, the same obstacles keep recurring, and next week’s actions remain unchanged, there is no need for a predictive model.

The future is already here—just in the form of small signals.

And that is precisely why writing your own status report is not enough.

You are not playing alone.

If I know what you tried, what you learned, and where you need help, I can connect my actions with yours.

One of the central ideas in Daniel Coyle’s The Culture Code is that strong teams allow people to be open and vulnerable—to admit mistakes, ask for help, and make problems visible before they become serious.

That is why I have a simple rule of hygiene when it comes to weekly status reports:

Failing to write your status report—or failing to read those of your teammates—is roughly equivalent to attending the weekly meeting without brushing your teeth.

You are not prepared.

And, most uncomfortably, everyone else can tell.

Usually, nobody says anything. We are polite people, after all.

In Radical Candor, Kim Scott calls this behaviour Ruinous Empathy: we want to preserve a good relationship, so we leave the necessary thing unsaid.

The problem is not one meeting attended with unbrushed teeth. The problem is that when we remain silent for long enough, the exception becomes the norm and the team’s standard begins to decline.

This brings me back to something I have written about before:

Discipline is hygiene.

We do not brush our teeth for eight consecutive hours once every quarter, nor do we organise a strategic toothbrushing day in January.

Small actions work precisely because we do them regularly—even when we do not particularly feel like it.

And perhaps discipline is something more.

Discipline is one of the highest forms of self-love.

Today’s version of you does something for which tomorrow’s version will be grateful.

Professionalism often begins with these small actions that nobody forces us to take, but whose consequences eventually catch up with us if we neglect them.

And then AI arrived.

At precisely the same time as artificial intelligence is becoming astonishingly good at reading, writing, synthesising, and building arguments, the latest PISA results indicate a worrying decline in functional reading skills.

According to OECD averages, reading performance has fallen noticeably over the past decade. Particularly concerning is the declining ability to work with complex texts, evaluate information, and combine knowledge from different sources.

From a historically short-term perspective, our response to this trend could be considered brilliant.

Let AI write.

The weekly summary? Copilot.

Meeting preparation? ChatGPT.

The retrospective? “Please turn this into five bullet points.”

Soon, AI may write our status report, while another team member’s AI reads it and produces a three-line summary.

People will save enormous amounts of time—at the expense of thinking.

This is where I see one of the most interesting paradoxes of the AI era.

We can automate the production of text, but we must not automate away the thinking that gave us a reason to write the text in the first place.

The most valuable outcome of writing may not be a document, memo, or status report.

The outcome of writing is clearer thinking.

That is why I have started looking at bureaucracy a little differently.

I do not want more forms, reports, or approval processes. AI can happily take responsibility for many of those.

What I want to preserve are the small rituals that force us to look at our goals, learn from our actions, and make our thinking visible to others.

An elite athlete does this in a training diary. Amazon does it in a memo. A strong team does it in a weekly status report.

So, before you close your computer this week, ask yourself one question:

How do you end your working week?

Have you reviewed the week and honestly assessed how you moved towards your goals?

What worked? What did not? What did you learn? What will you do differently next week?

And have you built a bridge for the rest of your team by sharing all of this openly with them?

Because perhaps a weekly status report is not bureaucracy at all.

Perhaps it is simply the basic hygiene of a professional.

WEEKLY RECOMMENDATIONS

• 📖 Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance — Angela Duckworth (2016)
  Duckworth’s research on grit, self-control, and perseverance earned her a MacArthur Fellowship—popularly known as a “Genius Grant.” The book also includes a great technique Duckworth uses to help develop character in her children: how to teach people not to quit simply because something becomes difficult, uncomfortable, or tedious. Hint: the same rule also applies to parents.

• 🚀 Empowering AI — Try EMP365 free for 30 days
  If you want AI adoption to become more than a series of random experiments, EMP365 gives your team a framework for moving twice as fast, achieving twice the results, and doing it with half the effort. Set a goal, maintain focus, and create a fast, regular feedback rhythm at both individual and team level.