Why Writing Culture Fails Without Reading Culture
Most modern software companies pride themselves on their writing culture. Amazon, for instance, is often cited as the gold standard here. And they are right: writing has immense value.
Well-written documents sharpen the writer’s thinking, align diverse stakeholders, and make communication asynchronous. Each reader can absorb the content at their own pace and revisit it anytime. In today’s environment distributed work is the norm, remote work has also found a lot of traction, and Gen-AI tools rely on written input. So the importance of documentation has only grown. Companies with strong documentation practices gain a clear advantage.
But here’s the hidden truth most companies miss: a writing culture collapses without a reading culture to support it.
The Missing Piece: Reading Culture
It’s easy to enforce writing culture. You can mandate design docs, RFCs, PRDs, or ADRs. You can create templates, reward excellent documents, and make processes depend on them. But this assumes one thing: that someone will actually read them.
The reality is often different. A company might produce a treasure trove of documents. Yet if employees don’t spend time reading and understanding them, their impact drops to near zero. Writing without reading is like speaking into an empty room.
Communication is always two-way. Writing must be complemented by reading for the loop to close. Without that, even the best document is just dormant text.
The Cost of Poor Reading Habits
I’ve personally experienced this gap multiple times. Imagine you prepare a document before a key discussion, share it with participants well in advance, and leave enough time for them to digest it. Then the meeting begins—and within minutes, you realize half the room hasn’t done the reading. People ask questions already covered in the document. Misunderstandings hijack the agenda. Valuable meeting time is wasted syncing context rather than solving problems.
Amazon solves this by setting aside time at the start of a meeting for silent reading. Everyone reads the material together, only then starting the discussion. It’s a deceptively simple fix that levels the playing field. Unfortunately, most companies don’t do this, and many documents demand more careful reading than busy calendars allow.
This gap doesn’t just affect meetings. It appears everywhere:
- Runbooks and SOPs: Skipped reading leads to operational mistakes that were already preventable.
- Troubleshooting: Teams waste hours investigating issues whose answers are already documented.
- Design docs and RFCs: Critical historical reasoning behind major decisions sits unread, causing teams to revisit old debates instead of pushing forward.
The cost of not reading compounds invisibly until it shows up as wasted effort, repeated mistakes, or slower decision-making.
Why Writing Is Easier to Enforce than Reading
Building a writing culture, while not trivial, is straightforward. Documents can be required as part of workflows. Quality can be reviewed and incentivized. Writers thrive on recognition for clear contributions.
Reading, however, is less tangible. Discipline, focus, and curiosity are harder to enforce than output. Different people read at different speeds and with different levels of seriousness. Some skim, some dig deep, and some don’t read at all.
And scaling a reading culture across an entire company? That’s the real challenge.
How to Strengthen Reading Culture
Still, it’s possible to move the needle by making reading a visible, supported part of company culture. A few practical approaches:
- Dedicate time for reading: Amazon’s practice of silent reading before meetings ensures shared context. This scales better than assuming everyone has bandwidth beforehand.
- Leverage tools to make reading easier: Large Language Models (LLMs) and search systems can summarize or extract relevant details from long documents. This lowers the barrier to consuming content at scale.
- Set clear expectations: Pre-reads are not optional. Leaders can model this behavior by coming prepared and expecting teams to do the same.
- Recognize good readers, not just good writers: Celebrate people who consistently engage with written material and bring thoughtful questions or feedback. They raise the collective bar.
The Multiplier Effect
When reading culture takes root, something remarkable happens: it amplifies the value of writing. Writers know their effort won’t be ignored—they’re writing for active readers, not an empty void. Readers, in turn, learn faster, make sharper decisions, and avoid reinventing the wheel.
The synergy of strong writing and reading creates a self-reinforcing knowledge loop:
- Documents get better because people take them seriously.
- Meetings become more productive because participants arrive informed.
- Teams move faster because they reuse past learnings instead of redoing old work.
- Quality improves because mistakes aren’t endlessly repeated.
In other words: companies that master both writing and reading build smarter organizations.
Final Thought
Writing by itself may look like progress—but without reading, it’s just text sitting idle. The companies that will thrive in the AI era and the remote-first world are those that see communication as a complete cycle: writing plus reading.
Because at the end of the day, a culture that values both will always outperform one that celebrates only half the equation.