Assume Everyone Is Full of It

I’ve been leaning on a mental model lately that’s deceptively simple.s

Assume everyone is full of it.

I call it FOS-ness.

As in: Full of S**t.

Here's the premise: assume, by default, that everyone — vendors, pundits, analysts, AI tools, news sources, social media influencers, and yes, even well-meaning colleagues — is operating with some degree of FOS-ness.

Not necessarily lying. Not necessarily malicious. Just incomplete. Motivated. Framed to serve something. Unvetted.

Assume that every claim, benchmark, insight, or recommendation carries some degree of bounded context, agenda, or error — and that your job is to figure out how much.

For CMOs and founders, this isn’t a philosophical stance. It’s operational hygiene.

That assumption doesn't weaken you. It puts you in control of the frame.

This Isn't a New Problem. It's a Faster One.

In This Doesn't Look Right, I wrote about the daily assault on reality we navigate now — phishing texts, AI-generated search summaries, viral content of dubious origin. We've gone from a world where the default assumption was true until proven false to something much closer to the opposite.

In Who Are Your Sensemakers?, I wrote about how the traditional gatekeepers — institutions, editors, credentialing bodies — have largely been bypassed. Anyone with a LinkedIn account and a strong opinion can reach thousands. That's a genuine shift in power. It also means the burden of vetting has moved squarely onto you.

Executives have always navigated spin. What’s changed is velocity.

Generative AI can now produce authoritative-sounding content at scale. Synthetic social proof is  easy to manufacture. Distribution is frictionless. The traditional signals of credibility — institutional affiliation, a polished byline, professional design — are no longer reliable proxies for rigor.

The risk isn’t just misinformation. It’s acceleration. Confident claims compound faster than scrutiny. In that environment, FOS-ness isn’t paranoia. It’s posture.

This Doesn't Look Right was about noticing distortion. FOS-ness is about deciding how you show up once you know it's there.

We don't need panic. We need a better starting posture.

FOS-ness Is Not Paranoia

This is not a call to distrust everyone in the room. I'm not saying every vendor is lying to you, every analyst is bought, or every AI summary is wrong.

I'm saying: build verification into the workflow. Assume partiality.

FOS-ness is productive skepticism. Not suspicion — self-respect. It's the refusal to outsource your judgment to whoever sounds the most certain.

It's not about assuming bad faith. It's about assuming bounded context. And when you expect incompleteness, you stop being shocked by it. You stop reacting emotionally to bold claims. You start evaluating structurally.

That shift is empowering.

Where FOS-ness Hides

You see it everywhere once you know to look.

The confident stat.
"73% of buyers say…" Where did that number come from? Who funded the study? What was the sample size? Was it 50 respondents drawn from an email list? 
Vendor-commissioned research isn’t necessarily wrong. It’s simply not neutral.

The AI summary.
You're no longer just seeing a result. You're seeing someone else's interpretation of the result, often with the original source increasingly out of view.

You’re often reading an interpretation of a source, not the source itself. Compression removes nuance. Context disappears. Structural FOS-ness is built into the interface

As I wrote in The Three Skills That Still Matter Most — now you are the filter.

The overnight expert.
A crisis hits, a trend breaks, a new platform emerges — and suddenly your feed fills with strong opinions and zero operating track record. FOS-ness isn't about doubting sincerity. It's about asking: what's the basis?

The internal narrative.
This is the most dangerous form. The slide deck that never gets pressure-tested. The metric that became a proxy for something no one quite remembers. The strategy that sounds coherent inside the building while quietly drifting from external reality.

Organizations don’t usually deceive themselves intentionally. They just stop checking.

In Narrative Myopia, I wrote about how a story can become more coherent inside the building while quietly drifting from reality outside of it. That drift is FOS-ness in slow motion. And that version is often the most dangerous — because nobody's trying to deceive anyone. They just stopped checking.

The Antidote Isn't More Information

Here's what I find most interesting: the solution isn't to consume more. It's to enter the situation differently.

The Vet → Synthesize → Curate framework still holds. But FOS-ness adds something important: it defines the posture you bring before you ever start vetting.

The advantage lies in posture.

When you hear a confident claim, resist the instinct to accept or reject it immediately. Ask a different question:

What would make this wrong?

That single move changes the dynamic. It shifts you from passive recipient to active evaluator. It surfaces assumptions. It exposes incentives. It invites rigor.

And notice who can answer that question calmly — without defensiveness. Those are the operators worth building with.

The Compound Effect

In a world full of partial truths, the advantage goes to the person who can see the boundaries — and name them calmly.

That's what FOS-ness really is. Not cynicism. Not paranoia. Not exhaustion. Clarity.

Over time, that posture compounds. You become harder to manipulate. Harder to impress with surface signals. Harder to distract with noise. And — this is the part people miss — you also become a better collaborator. Because when you stop expecting perfection from others, you start asking better questions instead. You create space for candor rather than performance.

That's not defensive. That's agency.

Berkson’s Bits

The "Zoom Era" has stripped away the peripheral context of office life — the hallway chats, the body language in the lobby, the shared lunch. We have to be much more intentional about building culture now because it no longer happens by accident.

What I’m Listening To…

This week I’m sharing a moment of funk. Larry Graham is credited with inventing the slap bass technique to make up for not having drums when he was playing backup for his mother. He went on to create iconic sounds with Sly & The Family Stone and many others. Start with the first 25 seconds of Hair by Graham Central Station. I’m sure you’ll stay for the rest. 

Where do you encounter FOS-ness most often? Vendor pitches? Internal strategy? The content you consume daily?

Hit reply. Let's talk.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation…

Alan