Around 370 BC, Plato has Socrates tell a short Egyptian myth. The god Theuth presents writing to King Thamus as a remedy for memory, but the king doesn’t buy it. In his view, people who read without a teacher will forget and end up with a mere semblance of knowledge, because they will believe they know without actually knowing.

So Socrates preferred speech. The irony is that his critique survived the centuries only because Plato took the trouble to write it down.

We all know that knowledge comes in two modes, starting with speech, which transmits and did so for millennia. Then there is writing, which accumulates, and that accumulation is what changed human history.

The village and its memory

Now picture a company in 2026. Replay the same story at a smaller scale and most organizations still live like an oral society.

Why did we drop that supplier, why do we never ship on Fridays, and why is this KPI computed this way rather than another? The answers exist, but they’re rarely written down, because they live in someone’s head and get passed along at the coffee machine.

And in the office, let’s admit it, that works. You overhear the conversation at the next desk, you look up from your screen to ask the colleague across from you, and you catch up on context over lunch. Information flows with no effort at all, and the office works like a human cache, fast, rich and contextual.

But a cache is volatile by nature. It empties when someone leaves, when a team changes, or simply when you weren’t there that day.

What Covid showed

We all watched that cache empty at once. Remember the company-wide full remote of the Covid years, when there was no neighbor and no conversation at the next desk anymore. We all have stories about it, with meetings multiplying, onboarding dragging on and decisions coming back to the table.

We concluded that remote didn’t work, and since then hybrid has gradually become the norm, often in the name of cohesion.

What’s interesting here is that remote wasn’t necessarily the problem. It simply showed that some companies ran mostly on speech and weren’t ready to work any other way. As a result, hybrid feels a bit like it’s hiding a gap, since we catch up at the office on everything that was never written down.

Remote leaves you less choice. It’s hard to look up at your neighbor when they’re two hundred miles away, so you write. Over time you learn to write well, which means setting the context, stating what was decided and making a discussion readable for someone who wasn’t there, or even recording short videos to go with it.

That’s why companies with a strong remote culture may be the best prepared for what comes next.

Meet Claude, your new colleague

And what comes next? AI agents, inevitably, these new “colleagues” (all things considered) who do a good share of our work for us.

They never look up from their screen. They don’t grab coffee and they don’t hear hallway chatter, because they only know what has been written, whether that’s documents, tickets or code.

So when a decision is missing, they don’t say “I don’t know” and they guess, with confidence. That is exactly the semblance of knowledge Socrates warned about, and what we now commonly call a hallucination.

This is often where AI projects come undone. People blame the technology, when the problem sits in the company’s own memory.

My bet

Faced with this new colleague, my bet is that if we ever want so-called “agentic” organizations at scale, writing will have to become the norm again. We’ll have to write down what we decide, in the office as much as remotely, because speech is for debating and writing is for lasting.

Some understood this long ago, and the best-known example is still Amazon. Every leadership meeting there opens with a memo that everyone reads in silence before the discussion starts. In that setting, nobody can afford an AI-generated memo, since everyone reads it and it would show immediately. The practice of 1-, 2- or 6-pagers runs through the whole company, to the point of being second nature.

More recently, lemlist made it mandatory to write by hand, without AI, a one-pager attached to every internal note, with your thinking, your conclusion and your recommendation. It’s the same mechanism, because writing it yourself forces you to think and being read makes you answer for it.

What else?

Make no mistake, the coffee machine or a restaurant (I’m French, after all) remain excellent places to talk and to decide. They’re just rarely places where anything gets remembered.

Nobody is going to put microphones everywhere to record it all, the way we record a Google Meet or a Zoom (and we’ll talk another day about how well Granola and friends actually work). There is no right or wrong place to decide, as long as the decision gets written down.

Yet in an oral culture, that rarely happens. A decision made in passing never leaves the hallway, and the people who weren’t there find out too late, which creates friction.

That’s why a strong writing culture helps you scale with agents. Coincidence or not, fully remote companies have little choice but to work this way, while the others make do.

To close, here’s a small test for after your next meeting that carries any strategic weight. If you didn’t write down what was decided and how, ask yourself: six months from now, will someone who wasn’t there (or even an AI agent) understand the why behind that decision?