Over the past 18 months, in conversation after conversation with senior leaders, I’ve noticed something that I can’t quite ignore anymore. Not so much a dramatic collapse - something quieter than that. I would call it a kind of slow erosion.
Many of the people I speak to are operating under immense pressure. Clearly, that part isn’t new. What is new is how often that pressure is being misinterpreted.
Internally, it gets translated into something like:
“Maybe I’m not adapting fast enough.”
“Maybe I’m falling behind.”
“Maybe this is on me.”
But from where I sit, it rarely looks like failure. More a case of capable, experienced people trying to function - often very well - inside systems that no longer operate at a human rhythm, and that distinction matters more than we tend to acknowledge.
I was reminded of this recently when I came across a point made by Dr Yuval Noah Harari. He observed that human beings are fundamentally cyclical, while the systems we are now embedded in increasingly are not. That stayed with me.
Because when you really sit with it, a lot of it begins to make sense.
We are biological creatures. We work in rhythms. Naturally, we need sleep, recovery and reflection - pauses in which thought can settle and meaning can emerge.
Our inner architecture was never designed for permanent activation.
Algorithms, by contrast, don’t get tired.
They don’t need to step back, they don’t need to make sense of anything and they don’t ask whether the pace itself has become unsustainable.
And yet, more and more of modern work is being shaped by that exact logic.
The result isn’t always obvious at first; it’s not necessarily burnout in the traditional sense, but what I see more often is something subtler.
Attention begins to fray. Emotional bandwidth shortens.
There’s a sense - often hard to articulate - that even when things look successful externally, something internally is being worn down.
This is one of the least discussed dimensions of modern leadership.
We talk constantly about performance, scale, adaptability, AI readiness.
Far less often do we ask a more fundamental question:
What happens when human beings are expected to operate at machine tempo?
The answer, I think, is already visible.
People become more reactive than discerning. Communication becomes more functional than thoughtful. Decision-making becomes compressed.
And over time, leaders begin to lose contact with the very qualities that made them effective in the first place i.e.
Judgement.
Calm.
Perspective.
Depth.
Which is why I don’t think this moment can be solved with productivity systems or marginal efficiency gains. It requires something more deliberate.
In my humble opinion - a rehumanisation of leadership.
Not in a soft or sentimental sense, but a strategic one.
Because in an environment defined by acceleration, the leaders who create real trust are often the ones who can do something increasingly rare.
They can slow the signal down enough for people to think, absorb complexity without transmitting panic, communicate change without sounding mechanistic.
Critically, they can remain psychologically intact inside systems that reward constant stimulation. In that sense, steadiness is becoming a competitive advantage.
So if you’ve found yourself feeling more stretched than usual…
More mentally crowded…
Or slightly further away from your best thinking…
It may not be because you are falling behind, but instead because the pace around you has stopped being human.
And if that’s the case, then the task is not simply to keep up. It’s to protect: deliberately and intelligently - the conditions under which good thinking, good leadership, and a coherent inner life remain possible.
You should not think of this as some kind of indulgence. For all that, it’s part of the job now…and perhaps increasingly, it is the job.
Here’s a question worth sitting with:
Where in your current life or leadership are you trying to operate at a speed that your deeper intelligence no longer agrees with?
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