Your Team Is Drowning in Information But Starving for Learning

It starts with a Ping.

It’s 11:00 PM on a Tuesday. You’re winding down, maybe scrolling through your phone, when you see it. A Slack notification from Fred.

Fred has found an article. Another article. It’s titled “The Future of Asynchronous Workflows in a Post-AI World.” It looks smart. It looks important. Fred has captioned it: “Great read! A must for the whole team!”

You click the link. You see, the scroll bar is tiny. It’s a 15-minute read. You feel that familiar little pang of guilt in your stomach. You think, “I don’t have the brain space for this right now. I’ll bookmark it for tomorrow.”

Narrator voice: You will not read it tomorrow. You will never read it.

And here is the tragedy: Fred isn’t trying to be annoying. He thinks he’s helping. He thinks that by dumping information into the company chat, he is building a “learning culture.”

But he isn’t. He’s just building a library where nobody reads the books.

The Mistake We All Make

We have confused access with learning.

Most companies treat knowledge like a hoarding situation. We pile up PDFs, we record every single Zoom call, we save documents from 2019 “just in case.” We act like squirrels gathering nuts for a winter that never comes.

We think we are building a library. But a library is a passive place. It’s quiet. It’s dusty. You go there to find old things.

Your team doesn’t need a library. They need a gym.

Think about the difference. In a library, success is measured by how many books are on the shelves. In a gym, success is measured by sweat. It’s messy. It’s active. It’s about doing the reps.

Right now, your team is walking into the gym, and instead of a workout plan, you’re throwing 500 heavy weights at their feet and saying, “Here, figure it out.”

Of course, they aren’t lifting them. They’re crushed.

So, How Do We Fix It?

We have to stop acting like archivists and start acting like humans.

The next time you—or Fred—want to share something, pause. Don’t just hit forward. That’s lazy. If you want your team to actually learn, you have to do the heavy lifting for them.

Don’t send the link. Send the epiphany.

Don’t say, “Here is the quarterly report.” Say, “Check out page 4. It explains exactly why we lost that client last week. It hurts to read, but we need to fix this.”

Give them the sweat, not the weight.

And while you’re at it, stop being obsessed with perfect documentation. Humans are tribal. We don’t learn from perfectly polished handbooks. We learn from the “Oops.” We learn when Sarah from Engineering leans over and says, “Hey, don’t press that big red button, it crashes the server.”

That 10-second warning is worth more than a 50-page manual. Capture that. Encourage people to share the messy, loud, imperfect lessons. A 60-second voice note about a mistake is better than a webinar nobody watches.

The Bottom Line

If you want a learning culture, you have to stop feeding your team information. They are already full. They are stuffed.

Start feeding them curiosity. Start feeding them context.

The goal isn’t to have the smartest articles saved in a folder that no one touches. The goal is that moment when someone on your team stops, eyes wide, and says, “Oh! Now I get it.”

That’s the rep that actually counts.

Regards,
Rupesh