The Campfire is Running Your Business

Why the Acceleration Decade doesn’t need faster leaders. It needs more literate ones.

Writing is about 5,000 years old.

The human voice is 300,000.

For most of our ancient history, we processed the world the way oral cultures do: through story, through feeling, through the tribe. We learned what mattered by watching who got animated at the fire. We decided what was true based on who told it most compellingly. We trusted the elder, the chief, the person speaking loudest. Not the abstract data.

Then writing arrived. Then print. All relatively new. And something remarkable happened to our cognition.

Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong spent decades on an argument most people have never heard of, and it may be the most useful frame we have for understanding why business leadership keeps getting harder.

Their core insight: literacy doesn’t just change what we know. It restructures how we think.

Linear. Sequential. Abstract. Individual. Writing trains us to separate stimulus from response, to evaluate an argument on its merits rather than on who’s delivering it, to follow a chain of evidence across time even when it contradicts what feels true right now.

Derek Thompson made this case recently in conversation with Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal: we are not moving forward into new media. We are reverting. Social media is ancient media. The campfire, at global scale. And with it, we are slipping back into oral modes of thinking... reactive, tribal, optimized for social memorability rather than accuracy.

Put differently, we’re trying to lead in a world where the campfire and the book are both running at once.

Literacy gave us calculus and vaccines. Orality gives us virality and belonging. We may be trading one for the other.

You might think that it’s an interesting cultural critique but there is more to it! This is what’s happening inside every leadership meeting I’ve ever sat in.

Someone influential says something alarming. The room goes reactive. People start solving for the feeling of the moment rather than the underlying structure of the problem. Speed gets confused with clarity. And the faster everyone moves, the more it feels like the right call, because everyone’s moving together. That tribal alignment feels like conviction.

It isn’t.

That is an oral decision. The tribe reacting to the fire.

I’ve watched it happen in boardrooms for 17 years. A competitor makes a splashy announcement. The CEO gets rattled. By Friday, the whole team has committed to a pivot nobody pressure-tested. Not because the data supported it. Because the energy in the room did.

The Acceleration Decade

Scott Barker, a VC operator who burned out after a decade of relentless acceleration, is calling what’s next the Acceleration Decade. His thesis: we are entering a period of change so fast, so personalized, and so relentless that our nervous systems literally cannot keep up. He knows because his didn’t. Couldn’t focus without a pill. Couldn’t sleep without another one. Couldn’t relax without a drink.

His warning: this is about to become the default experience for leaders, not the exception.

I believe him. But I want to push on the diagnosis.

He didn’t burn out because the world accelerated. He burned out because he had no system for deciding which races were his to run. He said yes to every signal. He treated every campfire as the main fire. And eventually his body said no.

That is not an acceleration problem. That is an orality problem. He made campfire decisions at machine speed with nothing underneath them.

Strategic Urgency

Strategic Urgency is my attempt to build a literacy-era discipline for a world that has gone oral.

The framework runs in three phases: SEE, INTERPRET, ACT. The deeper logic underneath all three is about one thing: creating enough distance between stimulus and response to ask whether what you’re reacting to is actually a signal that matters for you.

SEE asks you to scan for what’s moving underneath the noise. What your customers are doing, not just saying. Where talent is flowing. Who values what you have disproportionately right now. Where smart money is moving. What cultural momentum is building. What disruptions are rewiring the market.

These aren’t the campfire signals. They’re the quiet shifts. The customer behavior change that isn’t in any press release, the talent movement that hasn’t made headlines, the tailwind that’s been building for eighteen months while everyone reacts to something louder. You can’t find them by watching what’s loudest. You find them by looking for what’s structurally true even when no one is talking about it.

INTERPRET is where the literacy discipline gets explicit. Five questions built to create analytical distance from the tribal moment. One of them: If our competitor acted on this signal tomorrow, how would we feel? That question forces you to model consequences rather than just react to conditions. It requires thinking across time. It separates what feels urgent from what actually is.

There’s also a built-in threshold: 3 out of 5 If a signal doesn’t register across at least three of the five dimensions, you’re probably chasing noise. You’re probably responding to whoever spoke loudest at the last meeting. The threshold is a rule against oral decision-making.

ACT asks one question: how reversible is this? Oral cultures move fast and together... that synchronized speed is part of their power. Strategic Urgency asks you to slow down just enough to know whether fast is the right speed, or whether speed is just what the moment’s energy is demanding.

About 90% of the actions you’ll take are what I call Pop Rocks moments. Small, quick, reversible. Try them. If they work, great. If not, no damage done. Maybe 10% are Netflix moments. Major pivots where the stakes are real and the window won’t stay open. Strategic Urgency doesn’t slow everything down. It helps you know which category you’re in before you commit.

Most urgency isn’t urgency. It’s the campfire. It’s the tribe reacting to the loudest voice in the room.

The Acceleration Decade doesn’t change this ratio. It makes the cost of getting it wrong much higher. Leaders who don’t have a system for separating signal from tribal noise won’t just feel overwhelmed. They’ll make the wrong bets faster. They’ll burn out at scale. They’ll confuse motion with direction.

In the Acceleration Decade, the leaders who win won’t be the ones who move fastest. They’ll be the ones who stay literate while everyone else goes back to the fire.

What signals are you treating as urgent right now? And when did you last ask whether they’re actually yours to act on? Hit reply. I want to know what you’re seeing.