Common sense is often assumed to be universal, instinctive, applied knowledge, a structured culture and completely natural. In reality, it is none of these. It is not an innate trait we are born with, but rather a mental habit learned over time. It is the steady practice of using basic reasoning, personal experience, everyday knowledge, and practical judgment to make daily decisions. This habit relies entirely on individuals choosing to think for themselves rather than blindly deferring judgment to external authorities or automated systems.

There is a growing worry that modern society, despite having more access to information and advanced technology than ever before, is slowly giving up on active thinking. The problem is not that people are becoming less intelligent. Instead, we are weakening the exact mental muscles that create common sense in the first place. This shift has massive consequences for our daily lives, how we interact with others, how communities handle crises, and how we manage unexpected risks.

Thinking as an Active Skill

We often treat thinking as an automatic reflex, like breathing. In reality, it is an active  skill made of two main parts: focused consideration and logical reasoning.

• Consideration means carefully looking at the facts, weighing alternatives, and thinking about future consequences.
• Reasoning means connecting those pieces of information logically to reach a solid conclusion.

Both require effort, knowledge, time, and practice. Without regular use, these skills could very well “expire”.

This decline represents a massive, hidden vulnerability. The human brain is naturally wired to save energy, meaning it always looks for immediate gratification. When we let external systems and tools do the thinking for us, our capacity for independent questioning begins to shrink. This creates a dangerous dependency where we become passive passengers following a pre-programmed map, rather than active drivers navigating the real world.

In everyday life, people increasingly hand over their judgment to media narratives, public figures, or computer algorithms. TikTok information is rarely validated and there are much more sharing of news or information that turned out to be fake. This becomes a total surrender when we stop checking if those conclusions actually make sense.

We see this clearly in how readily people accept oversimplified explanations and how little patience they have for deep analysis. Our collective attention span has shortened so dramatically that many struggle to engage with complex, long-form information without looking for shortcuts or instant summaries. In this environment, people simply swallow ready-made conclusions instead of building their own.

In a corporate setting, this surrender shows up as blind compliance, a dangerous state of mind where employees mistake the mere existence of a rule, checklist, or process for actual safety.

The Tool vs. The Crutch

Artificial Intelligence excels at sorting through massive amounts of data and spotting patterns at speeds, allegedly, humans cannot match. Used correctly, AI is an excellent tool to support decisions. Used poorly, it replaces the decision-maker entirely. A tool sharpens human judgment; a crutch replaces it. When we accept AI results without questioning the underlying assumptions, we skip the entire process of reasoning. The long-term risk is that we will lose the ability to notice when these digital tools are completely wrong.

These are not mere suggestions. There are aviation incidents where pilots relied too heavily on autopilot systems and failed to intervene when the system disengaged or produced conflicting readings. Even though they could see what was actually happening around them, these trained pilots trusted technology over their own experiences. Amazon stopped using an AI hiring tool after discovering it unfairly rejected women’s resumes. The computer had learned bad habits from old hiring dataand for a while, managers accepted the AI’s recommendations without questioning them.

The most layman example would be that we ourselves blindly trust GPS systems. Many drivers have followed GPS instructions onto dangerous or nonsensical roads, like driving into restricted areas or off-road hazards (which is specifically common for delivery drivers). These simple examples show people ignoring basic common sense just because a computer screen tells them where to go.

Common sense, ideally, serves as our first line of defence against terrible decision. It allows people to spot unusual red flags and double-check conclusions that look perfect on paper but make absolutely no sense in reality. When individual reasoning is outsourced, collective common sense breaks down. This creates environments where:

• Obvious dangers are ignored simply because they do not fit into official, standardised risk models.
• Flawed assumptions go unchallenged because they come from an authoritative or prestigious source.
• Early warning signs are overlooked until a minor issue snowball into a massive, widespread failure.

History is full of systemic failures caused by ignoring the obvious. During the 2008 financial crisis, complex mathematical formulas blinded major institutions to the unstable housing bubble which was right under their noses. When a computer model says “everything is fine” but real-world conditions say “this cannot last,” a lack of active thinking ensures the model wins every time. This represents a dangerous loss of human oversight.

Implications for Governance and Risk Management

An organisation’s risk framework is only as strong as the human thinking behind it. Relying too heavily on automated dashboards, green-light KPIs, AI risk dashboards and bulletproof metrics without questioning them leaves an organisation wide open to groupthink and blind spots. Technology does not eliminate risk; it simply sweeps it under the rug. Risks are innately impossible to remove entirely at the first place, it can
only be properly managed.

For the Board of Directors and senior leadership, addressing this shift is a matter of fiduciary duty and robust oversight. Boards cannot protect an organisation if they treat independent thinking as a “soft skill.” Instead, it must be viewed as a core internal control. An organisation’s risk maturity cannot be measured by how expensive or complex its software is, but by how safe employees and directors feel asking tough, dissenting questions.

The line between oversight and daily operations must stay distinct. The Board’s job is to set the standards and insist that ideas are challenged. Leadership’s job is to take those expectations and weave them into every day, practical decision-making.

Governance bodies must move beyond passive oversight and actively ensure that critical thinking is embedded into decision-making structures:

• Board Challenge Mentality: The board’s official rules should clearly state that members must question and challenge management’s assumptions.
• Explanations as a Demand: Risk Committees should require that any major AI or computer-generated report comes with a simple, plain-English explanation. It needs to clearly show what the data assumes, where it falls short, and what it might be missing.
• 3rd Party Checks: Audit Committees should bring in independent, outside experts to regularly check their most important software and algorithms. This helps spot hidden biases, technical errors, threshold mismatch, cultural misalignment or places where the technology doesn’t match how the business actually works.
• Track Speak-up Rate: Boards should look at behavioural warning signs in their regular risk reports. They need to track things like how often staff disagree with a computer’s decision, instances where a human had conflicts with the software program, and close calls caused by bad assumptions.

To turn these board expectations into real-world action, leadership needs to set up practical habits that encourage critical thinking and active engagement:

• The Challenge Mandate: Before any automated report or AI-driven forecast is used for major strategic decisions, a designated team member or reviewer must identify at least two logical gaps or unverified assumptions within the data.
• The “Circuit-Breaker” Review: An operational practice where no major automated conclusion can pass through the chain of command without a leader pausing the process to demand a clear, non-technical justification of the findings.
• The Ground-Reality Baseline: A formal requirement that practical, frontline operational feedback is given equal weight against high-level data models, preventing decision-makers from becoming disconnected from reality.

Conclusion

Common sense is fading because the habit of careful, deliberate thinking is being diluted by convenience. Our obsession with speed, automation, and instant answers is slowly chipping away at our judgment.

Fortunately, this trend can be stopped. Reversing it requires us to view independent thinking as a critical capability rather than an optional intellectual virtue. Technology should support human reasoning, not replace it. We need to cultivate environments (both in our daily lives and our boardrooms) where asking questions is normal and applying human judgment is required, not avoided. If we fail to do this, we will no longer be using advanced tools, we will be using a brain crutch.

The article was written by Adley John Fisher Mangkiu.

Photo by Merrilee Schultz on Unsplash.