Shared Understanding Is Humanity's Superpower. So Why Don't We Optimize for It?

In the Beginning Were the Words

Allow me to set the scene: It's 50,000 years ago, give or take a few millennia, and you are part of an early human society. Your community is small, perhaps just a few dozen people, and you live as hunter-gatherers. The landscape around you includes fields, forests, and rivers that teem with fish and game. You and your group are constantly on the move, following the seasons and migration patterns.

Your survival depends on your ability to find food, water, and shelter, and to share what you discover. Your tools are simple but effective. Your knowledge is practical, hard-won, and collectively held. You learn by watching and imitating. You remember by telling and retelling.

And you speak. Not in grunts or gestures, but in full, complex, syntactic human language, as rich as the language we use today. Your language enables you to describe hunting grounds, recount past events, plan future movements, warn of threats, and celebrate your victories. It lets you pass down skills, preserve hard-won wisdom, and build a shared worldview with your group.

Your ability to share words lets you coordinate thinking and action across minds. It allows you to transform a group of distinct individuals into a cohesive, flexible, and adaptable whole. By sharing words, you make possible something that is still rare, beautiful, and extraordinarily powerful: shared understanding that enables complex, collective interaction.

Same Species, New World, Same Challenge

Fast-forward 50,000 years. We're still the same species with the same fundamental need for shared understanding. But creating it has become far more complex.

What was once a small band of hunter-gatherers has become eight billion people, connected by networks that can transmit nearly any piece of information to anyone, anywhere, in seconds. We've built devices that let us talk across continents, share images instantly, and access huge repositories of collected knowledge with a few keystrokes.

Yet for all our technological prowess, we face the same core challenge our ancient ancestors did: How do we get everyone to see the same problem, understand the stakes, contribute to the discussion, and agree on what to do next?

We've solved the problem of information transfer. But along the way, we’ve massively complicated the problem of shared understanding. Instead of conversations, we now have content. Instead of shared meaning, we now have targeted messaging. Instead of collective wisdom, we now have complex knowledge management systems. 

We live in a massively interconnected world, but with minimal shared understanding. With infinite information at our fingertips, we’re stumbling through a crisis of meaning.

Shared Understanding Makes the Teamwork Make the Dream Work

Shared understanding is what allows a group of people to align around a common purpose, coordinate their efforts, and pursue their goals together. 

With shared understanding, a team of soccer players can coordinate fluid movements across a field without speaking. Without shared understanding, they have skills but little direction. With shared understanding, dozens of musicians can play a symphony together flawlessly. Without it, they're just separate instrumentalists. With shared understanding, millions of people can coordinate their efforts to send other humans to the moon and bring them safely back to Earth. Without it, we're just people talking past each other.

Our ability to achieve shared understanding is the secret to our species' success. None of our highest and best achievements happen because one of us can transfer information rapidly or at scale. All of them happen because a group of us can make sense of the world together and begin to reshape it. 

When someone like me stresses about narrative structure, obsesses over message and tone, edits for brevity, and relentlessly pursues clarity and repeatability, what we're really chasing is a bigger, better goal. What we’re really chasing is that precious moment when a group of people can say, together, "Yes. That's what we mean. And here's what we should do about it."

We're chasing shared understanding, but—weirdly—our modern communication platforms aren’t set up to produce it.

We Should Optimize Accordingly

Today’s most common communication platforms—from email to web to social media—optimize for the wrong things: They optimize for speed, scale, and surface engagement rather than complexity, conversation, and the creation of shared meaning. They treat rapid and ever-increasing information transfer as the goal, wrongly assuming that more information automatically creates better understanding.  

They structure communication as a competitive performance where the goal, for each of us, is to get our own message out, capture a smidgeon of someone’s attention, and win a quick click or "like" (most often defined by an emoji, and with roughly equal depth).

The result is a world where we can all broadcast bits and bytes of information to a potential audience of billions, even as we actually connect with no one. In this world, junk information proliferates, the struggle for splintered attention intensifies, and we all disappear into shrinking digital bubbles. And now AI is poised to accelerate the process.  

Imagine, for a moment, what the world might look like if we optimized for shared understanding instead:

• We would treat two-way, human-to-human conversation as the model for all communication: The goal would be productive dialogue, not perpetual broadcasting. Instead of seeking to turn everyone into content consumers, we would seek to turn everyone into dialogue partners. 

• We would treat mutual misalignment as the normal starting point for every conversation and plan to mitigate accordingly: The goal would not be to put MY takes on blast but to learn from one another and strengthen OUR shared understanding, recognizing that the further we start from ideal communication conditions (physically, culturally, emotionally), the more work shared understanding will require.

• We would design systems and processes with checkpoints in place to confirm comprehension, treating understanding checks (listening and repeating, discussing and aligning) as normal and necessary rather than inefficient.

• Most importantly, we would measure success by shared understanding rather than by speed or quantity of information transfer. The key question wouldn't be "How many people received my message?" but "Are the people we need to work together aligned and prepared to collaborate?"

Instead of optimizing for speed, scale, and performative engagement, we would optimize for collective capacity to act. Instead of viewing communication as a form of individual broadcasting, we would view it as a form of community-building and collective authorship. The goal wouldn't be to win the current news cycle, but to advance the sorts of conversation that have always enabled human achievement.

At a social and political level, the job would be immense, complex, and frustrating in countless ways. It would also be world-changing. 

At a personal level, it could start with small choices, little adjustments we might make before writing another email, hopping on another Zoom call, or posting on social media. It could start with stopping to ask ourselves some different questions:

• Not "How can I get this task checked off my list quickly?" but "What does the person I'm talking to need to understand for us to move forward together?"

• Not "What else can I get done while I'm on this call?" but "What can I learn from what others are saying and doing?"

• Not "How do I prove that I'm right?" but "How can we understand the world better—and so move forward together?"

• Not "What do I want to say?" but "Where can we go from here?"

Not more information. Shared understanding.