I think that speed is only powerful if it allows us to cultivate its opposite: slowness, creativity, deeper presence. This inverse means that the value of agentic AI isn’t efficiency, rather it’s what is returned to us that we must claim. The space to cultivate our inner lives, build our creativity, and offer presence to the people around us.

This week I heard James Curleigh, the CEO of Pelican, share about “earning the right to reimagine.” That he has had a lot of hard lessons over his career where his wild and crazy ideas send his team running in one hundred directions. He has learned the hard way that his whisper is a shout. The question he has had to ponder, wrestle with and face almost daily, is how do you control your creativity?

Unchecked creativity is it’s own kind of speed problem. If your ideas are moving faster than the organization can absorb them, then you send people scrambling. This is a key lesson I have to continually learn: how to harness my creativity muscle, how to know when to build and dream and when to scale and reinforce. That is the tension of leadership in the age of AI: you are going to have a lot of opportunity, options, knowledge. Your mind, your thoughtfulness, your quiet thinking time at sunrise – that is the value your humanness will bring. What to take on, what to wait on, how to wait. Pace and scale has to be balanced with patience. Agressive patience.

So how do we earn our right to reimagine? Who do we need to become in order to wield this new strength?

I don’t believe we need to become faster, better, stronger. I think we need to become slower, steadier, more thoughtful, more philosophical, more subdued. We need to balance the power at our fingertips with the presence of our thoughts.

To earn the right to reimagine, we must continually go on the journey inward. We must rediscover the heart of what we believe, what we feel, so that we can become not better or faster, but so that we can become translators of knowledge.

Camus said it best: to understand the world, we must sometimes turn away from it. When we turn away from all of the agentic possibility, even for a moment, we can earn the right to use it well for ourselves and others. The walk in the woods, the slow morning, the time for prayer, for listening is the way, as it always was, to wisdom in the age of speed. The power of AI isn’t the speed it gives us, but the space it returns to us.