Faster document production is putting us into a decision quality doom spiral. Let’s talk about how two trends are killing us cognitively and what to do about it.

The outside world often makes much of Amazon’s writing culture. You can find plenty of writing on it from others, but the basics are: all proposals, reports, and reviews are presented in the form of a written narrative document, no longer than six pages (though you may add as many appendices as you like). We read the document in person for the first portion of a meeting, then discuss afterwards.

While we gain the advantages of building a collective, durable memory and the ability to share ideas outside of an ephemeral meeting, most importantly this approach promotes critical thinking on both the input and output sides of a proposition.

On the input side, the author cannot “baffle them with bullshit” in a rapid-fire slide presentation. They must think through the problem, consider the options, and then construct the story in a concise and coherent manner that stands up to scrutiny outside of fast talk and shiny slide transitions. Paper writing helps authors find the holes and inconsistencies in their own concepts, making for more thoughtful and thorough products.

On the output side, the readers have time to digest the “why’s” and “what’s” of an argument. They can go back and forth between sections and see the connections, gaining the nuance provided by the richer context. This not only allows the readers to form better critical questions, it engages their minds fully in the story and situation to allow them to make better decisions.

But there are two trends I’ve seen appear in the past few years that subvert the intent of the document-based culture and, I suspect, are contributing to worse outcomes: AI-assisted writing and Page Zero metrics.

How AI-assisted writing in its most extreme form subverts the critical thinking of the author should be obvious. Feeding some bullet point thoughts into an LLM and instructing it to turn it into a white paper just takes a slide deck and makes it worse. You’re meeting the form and losing the function.

Generally speaking, when I suspect that a white paper has been primarily authored by an LLM[1], my brain turns off. If the white paper presenter doesn’t respect me enough to spend the time thinking through their argument, I’m not going to respect the slop they’ve put in front of me. It’s the only time I’ll use an LLM to summarize a white paper for me.

Now, LLMs can still be useful in drafting white papers. I’ve found them to be effective in “linting” a white paper for readability and voice. They’re most useful when used as a mirror, to reflect on your arguments and whether they’re coming across properly. But that’s after the primary writing is complete.

The other trend, which is likely more Amazon-specific but far more dangerous, is Page Zero metrics. They’re just what they sound like: a “cover sheet” of a big pile of numbers before you get to any of the narrative behind them. An ocean of green up arrows and red down arrows short circuits any nuance and obviates the value of the following narrative.

Leaders like Page Zero metrics because they’re easy to digest. If you see a red arrow, you can nitpick it and feel productive. Just make all the red arrows green and you’ve done your job, right?

I recently spent 21 minutes of a 60 minute meeting listening to leaders bicker about whether the source of a certain metric was sufficiently accurate, when the metric is actually a proxy for whether the customer could achieve their goal. These leaders completely missed the real conversation they should have been having that actually was covered later in the narrative, but they hyper focused up front on that little red arrow and that was that. The much more nuanced and scarier conversation about end of life components that the team really needed executive decisions on was completely lost.

Page Zero metrics have an easy solution: go back to basics. Quantitative measurements do still matter, and they need to make an appearance. But Page Zero metrics aren’t a problem of data, they’re purely a problem of information design and crafting the conversation you need to have.

So put them in an appendix and drive the conversation as going section-by-section from front to back. Feature the conversations you want to have at the front of the document. If your leaders have too much fatigue from switching from meeting to meeting all day and can’t focus, go the psychological route and find the ways to make the document easier to digest through structural, grammatical, or even scheduling approaches.

If you can, kill some trees and have your readers review an actual physical white paper in person, using a pen to make notes in the margins. The physical interaction further reinforces engagement with the document, focuses people away from “multi-tasking”, and breaks your readers out of screen hypnosis.

Using written documents to interact with ideas provides the framework for the critical thought that LLMs can’t reproduce. We can use tools and mechanisms to improve the quality of our outcomes, or we can cut corners and turn into a cargo culture that preserves the ritual of the white paper while losing the thinking it was intended to produce. Don’t shortchange your readers, and don’t shortchange yourself.

[1] – To be clear, certain markers on their own don’t indicate LLM authorship to me per se. For example, African writers tend to get falsely called out by American readers for phrases such as “delve into”, which is really just an artifact of the British English they learned in school. And I love my em-dashes. You’ll never take my grammar fascism from me.