The Hidden Debt of Partial Understanding
Stop sacrificing long-term value for the illusion of efficiency
Stop Pretending to Read Documents
We've all been in that meeting. Someone sends out a lengthy technical document or proposal beforehand. The meeting starts, and everyone nods along, occasionally offering vague comments that could apply to almost any document. "Interesting approach" or "I have some concerns about scale." Eventually, someone admits they "only had time to skim it," and like dominoes, others follow with similar confessions.
This theater of partial reading is toxic to organizations. We're normalizing a culture of incomplete understanding while pretending we're being transparent about it. "I skimmed it" has become an acceptable excuse, as if reading 10% of something gives you 90% of the understanding. It doesn't.
The Ownership Problem
Reading and understanding a document isn't some checkbox activity - it's a core part of owning a decision or contributing meaningfully to a discussion. When you say "I don't have time to read this properly," what you're really saying is "I don't have time to participate in this decision properly." That's fine, but we need to be honest about it.
AI summarization tools have made this worse, not better. They've given us a technological fig leaf to hide behind. "Oh, I had GPT summarize it for me" is the new "I skimmed it." Both are ways of pretending to have knowledge we don't actually possess. The AI doesn't understand your organization's context, history, or needs. It's giving you a book report without any of the insight that comes from truly engaging with the material.
Time Management is Risk Management
"No time to read" really means "no time to make an informed decision." We're sacrificing long-term value for short-term gain. Every time we make a decision based on partial information, we're taking on risk. The problem compounds because we often don't discover these risks until much later, when the context is forgotten and the original decision-makers may have moved on.
This pattern creates a form of hidden technical and organizational debt. Much like poor code documentation or insufficient testing, partial understanding creates gaps that someone will eventually have to pay for. The cost might come in the form of rework, missed requirements, or decisions that have to be revisited and reversed.
What makes this particularly insidious is that we rarely track or measure these costs. When issues surface months or years later, we treat them as new problems rather than connecting them back to their root cause: decisions made without full understanding of the available information.
Proper Delegation
There is a solution, but it requires us to be honest with ourselves and our organizations. If you don't have time to fully read and understand a document, you need to fully delegate it to someone who does. Not "skim it and give me the highlights" delegation, but real delegation with authority and ownership.
This means finding someone who:
Has the technical background to understand the content
Has the context to know what matters to your organization
Has the time to actually do the reading
Has your trust to make or recommend decisions
Most importantly, you need to actually listen to them. If you've delegated the deep understanding to them, you need to respect that understanding. Otherwise, you're just creating extra steps in the "pretending to read" theater.
Changing the Culture
This requires a cultural shift away from the idea that everyone needs to know everything about everything. We need to normalize saying "This isn't my area of expertise, and I don't have time to develop that expertise right now. I'm delegating this fully to Alice, and I'll trust her judgment."
This isn't a weakness - it's good organizational hygiene. It creates clear ownership, clear accountability, and better decisions. It also makes space for people to develop real expertise instead of spreading themselves thin trying to maintain surface-level knowledge of everything.
The next time you're tempted to skim a complex document or run it through ChatGPT, stop and ask yourself: Should I take the time to really understand this, or should I delegate it to someone who can? There's no wrong answer, but pretending to understand is always the wrong approach.
Your organization's decisions are only as good as the understanding behind them. Stop pretending to read documents. Either read them properly or delegate them properly. Anything else is just organizational theater, and the cost of admission is far higher than you think.