Information Fast, Interpretation Slow

Your tools move information at light speed. Your organization interprets it at walking speed. Everything in between is where the trouble starts.

If Daniel Kahneman, author of the groundbreaking book “Thinking Fast and Slow” had been forced to use Slack, I’m convinced he would have written another book—

“Information Fast, Interpretation Slow.”

Our current work environment has become a live demonstration of his split-brain idea:

• System 1: fast, automatic, reactive

• System 2: slow, effortful, meaning-making

The core problem is simple:

Our information behaves like System 1.

Our understanding behaves like System 2.

And the widening gap between the two is where all the disconnects creep in.

Information Has Become System 1 on Steroids

Information now moves through organizations with breathtaking speed:

• instant notifications

• endless chats

• dashboards updating every second

• AI summarizing everything it sees

It’s pure System 1 energy: fast, frictionless, unquestioning.

But meaning?

Meaning is still slow, contextual, and human.

It doesn’t sync. It doesn’t auto-update. It doesn’t “just transfer.”

This mismatch is why today’s work environment feels fast but misaligned, busy but unclear, efficient but off.

We’ve built tools that accelerate information far beyond our ability to interpret it.

Meaning Lives in System 2 — And It’s Always Behind

Meaning requires:

• context

• nuance

• tacit knowledge

• shared assumptions

• the stuff no one writes down because no one realizes it matters until it breaks

In organizations, this is all System 2 work.

Slow. Thoughtful.

And very, very incompatible with a world optimized for speed.

So the message is sent instantly…

…but the understanding arrives later.

Or arrives distorted.

Or arrives somewhere completely different than intended.

This is not a communication problem.

It’s a context construction problem.

The Disconnect Factory

Here’s the simplest example:

“Status: Green.”

System 1 says: “Great!”

System 2 in each department quietly constructs its own meaning:

• Marketing: “We’re ahead of schedule.”

• Engineering: “Nothing’s on fire yet.”

• Finance: “We haven’t billed anything.”

• Leadership: “We can take on more.”

Same information.

Different meaning.

Guaranteed disconnect.

Kahneman would call this substitution:

We replace the hard question (“What does this mean?”) with an easy one (“What do I assume this means?”).

And because information travels fast, the misunderstanding travels fast with it.

We’ve Optimized the Wrong Half of the System

Organizations keep speeding up the movement of information:

• more tools

• more automations

• more notifications

• more dashboards

• more summaries

All while ignoring the real bottleneck:

the organization’s ability to turn information into shared meaning.

This is why “It was clear in the email” never matches what actually happened.

The email delivered information.

But meaning never made the trip.

So we meet.

We clarify.

We double-check.

We have little huddles.

We send follow-ups.

We draw diagrams.

We repeat ourselves.

Not because people are slow —

but because meaning is.

The Real Productivity Hack: Respect System 2

Instead of speeding up information, slow down long enough to ask:

• What does this actually mean to different teams?

• What assumptions are embedded in this update?

• Where might interpretations diverge?

• What context needs to travel with the information, not behind it?

In other words:

Let System 1 deliver the information.

Let System 2 deliver the understanding.

And stop expecting one to do the job of both.

This is the essence of a context-first organization:

Information gets somewhere fast.

Meaning gets somewhere true.

We need fewer messages delivered quickly,

and more meaning delivered deliberately.

That’s where the work actually improves.

Author’s Note

For the record, I have no inside knowledge on whether Daniel Kahneman ever used Slack or Teams. And after writing this, I sincerely hope he didn’t. He spent a lifetime studying how fast, low-context inputs create disconnects in how people understand the same information—exactly the dynamics these tools automate with cheerful enthusiasm. It feels almost respectful to imagine he was spared the cognitive mayhem of a modern notification stream.