I like trawling through old posts. It reminds me of ideas I had, what I was saying at the time, whether I have been consistent and whether I am still sticking to my values.

I was doing that the other day and found a post from six years ago about “hate reading”: forcing yourself to finish something you are not enjoying, purely so you can say you completed it.

At the time, I linked that to employees completing compliance learning. Six years ago, the concern was that employees might finish compliance e-learning while hating it.

Today, the stronger concern is that organisations may mistake digital completion for controlled risk.

Employees have more experience of digital work, more pressure on their attention, greater expectations of flexibility and more tools for bypassing unnecessary cognitive effort.

AI has made that bypass faster and harder to observe and the question is no longer simply whether people enjoyed, tolerated or resented the module.

It is whether the organisation has designed the work so that compliant performance is possible, and whether its evidence measures anything beyond successful interaction with the learning platform.