Stillness as Strategy: Designing for Depth, Not Just Speed
A Time to Rethink Motion
In the final months of 2001, the 20th century ended without a warning. Like so many people outside Lower Manhattan that day, I watched live on TV as thousands of lives were lost from a foreign attack on the United States. The 9/11 attacks can not be underestimated, and apart from all the pain and suffering that it has caused, that day the world was holding its breath and waiting for a third world war. I was living in São Paulo at the time, still early in my professional life, and like others from my generation, safe in the comfort that if I kept moving and working hard toward my goals, then something amazing would come just ahead. My colleagues and I worked on a digital agency and believed that progress required velocity and visibility; any hesitation could be read as weakness or lack of ambition.
That moment broke the picture of a future, not just politically or economically, but personally. The idea of waiting, slowing down, or even staying still had never occurred to me as a viable path forward, a strategic move. Something inside me started to question the pace I had adopted without really understanding, where was it leading, what happens when we stop running? Can clarity emerge only when movement stops?
That thought lingered as I packed a backpack and left for Argentina in December, under the pretext to buy a book, “Historietas para Sobrevivientes”, a book I’ve been researching about memory, history and experience as a way to survive adverse experiences. Apart from my job as art director I continued to write columns for MTV Brazil for years, with a few stories about comic books, cinema and pop culture. December 2001 the world had not yet ended, but pre-existing economic vulnerabilities around the world became more evident, especially in countries with prolonged recession, high levels of debt and unstable governments. I arrived in Buenos Aires a few days before Christmas, when the banking system in that country crashed, the President resigned and after violent riots happened I saw a scene straight from Mad Max: Shattered windows, burnt cars and desert streets.
Next thing I knew, I was ready to travel further and sold all my things, quit my job and went to Europe in the spring of 2002. I carried little more than a small amount of money, a vague sense of direction, and a battered Portuguese-English dictionary. No network, no safety net, but the need to experience something outside the frameworks I had grown up with. A few days before my 27th birthday, I made my way to Annecy in France, a small alpine town known for its international animation festival. While others were focused on careers in production or creative development, I wasn’t looking to break into a particular industry but still doing research, observing, and figuring out what would be the next rules of the game, and practising what I would later come to understand as strategic stillness. That’s not a term which I have coined, some pre-existing foreign policy initiatives after 9/11 were put on hold or deprioritised as focus shifted to counter terrorism, there was a broader impact on information technology, including security, risk management, and the development of resilient systems. In my case resilience proved to be a key element to understand things and build a life with more purpose.
The Misunderstood Power of Stillness
In business, particularly within complex enterprise operations, speed is not everything. Of course, in the context of evolving digital capabilities, companies think about outcomes impacting traditional Key process indicators. For instance, Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) is a measure of profitability of the operating business and comes along with revenue, working capital, and customer satisfaction to embed AI strategically.
Those outcomes help define certainty because the traditional approach is looking at what's around the corner all the time, which in turn creates a culture where rapid responses are praised, and quick rollouts are celebrated. Even when calendars start to look like tetris blocks, individuals working in Business Strategy start to perceive it as an indicator of influence with different stakeholders. People tend to manage change as if their time to deliver would be the main competitor, but high-performing environments recognize friction as something valuable for slowing down processes and prompting thoughtful consideration to re-evaluate strategy, identify and fix unnecessary obstacles.
What I learned during that early European journey, wandering through Portugal, Spain, and France, watching the fields and meeting the simple people in small villages, was what I would later confirm through years of working inside global companies. The lesson was that stillness is not about avoiding action, but about how to build stamina and discipline, to delay resolution until context can be fully understood and shape decisions emerging with coherence. Stillness is the moment when people say “wait a minute” to get alignment in progress.
Strategic stillness creates room for synthesis, because sometimes too much information can be overwhelming in environments overflowing with dashboards, reporting cycles, vendor proposals, and ever-changing acronyms. Clarity rarely comes from increasing activity; in decisive moments, it comes from thinking better, not faster. Changing the gears is what prevents premature commitment, for example, in the early 2000s, companies across Europe and the Americas came fast and furious into outsourcing decisions driven largely by the pressure to decentralize operations and cut costs quickly. In many cases, the operational logic was data-driven and solid, but the social and strategic framing was flawed.
There was little time made for local adaptation, or for narrative construction that could help people understand why change was happening and how it connected to their work. In the first years companies were thriving in inefficient processes. Years later, some of those early transformations required major corrections and here’s the interesting thing: The problem wasn’t necessarily the idea itself but sometimes the inability to pause long enough and consider how different parts of the system would react.
Leading with Friction, Not Force
So I went to France and the Annecy Animation Festival left me with more questions than answers, in terms of context. Attending talks I couldn’t fully follow, watching films without subtitles, and scribbling notes by the lake while others discussed portfolios and exchanged business cards gave me a sense of rhythm, nothing to do with productivity and everything about tuning in, finding coherence. Years later that moment of quietness emerged at a Design Thinking workshop aimed at the Global Mindfulness program at IBM, but that’s another story entirely.
While helping teams navigate enterprise change years later, the same principle reflected in Agile, where teams started with a vision and idea of the direction to take, taking time to stop and reflecting, adjusting and course correcting. The most effective leaders were not necessarily the loudest voices or the most frequent contributors in meetings. Often, the quiet ones who waited until the noise had settled before offering their perspective had more to share, because they observed the cadence of the team before setting their own. Quiet maybe not because they lacked answers, but because they had learned the cost of answering too soon.
Stillness became a leadership tool to get things deeper and even more relevant today, when we are asked to manage increasingly complex operations across time zones, systems, and functions. Every new platform promises agility; this vendor suggests acceleration, but integration failed because of weak technology or poor strategy. That’s a common scenario with pressure to move faster than understanding things, and never getting anything ready. Pausing signals that a leader knows the value of waiting, holding space for deeper alignment before taking any step forward.
Cadence Over Chaos
In those days, each country I visited, train station, and local interaction required a new adjustment during my trip. Moving too quickly would have me missing all the signals around me, lessons to learn, and new things to try. Waiting too long meant the next moment would pass, and progress came not from constant movement, but from knowing the speed along the way.
It’d be preposterous to say this should be the case in every business, because sometimes transformations do not collapse due to flawed design. Maybe that suffered mostly because of compressed timelines and an artificial sense of urgency, the itchy need to show progress becoming more important than the need to build understanding, and some people could live with that. However, Teams is moving too fast through rollout phases and skipping the deeper work of change management - preparing people, aligning narratives, and listening to concerns - resulting in friction disguised as productivity, alignment that only existed in presentation decks.
Designing for Clarity, Not Just Speed
Most shared services environments are built around activity; if there’s an escalation that must be resolved, and if there’s a Service Level Agreement that must be relevant. Stakeholders expect responsiveness and execution; there is little room for reflection, and even less for silence. Yet as organizations mature and begin to navigate more nuanced, people-centered transformations, silence invites sense-making, allowing people to catch up and reconnect.
Stillness enables better leadership development and potential to unfold naturally, rather than forcing individuals into roles because of timing or attrition. Data-driven financial decisions are purposely delaying resource allocation until patterns emerge, because it supports digital maturity, leaving room for feedback while things happen and shape what happens next. I am not advocating to stop everything and go outside to listen to birds singing, but those constant moments where teams are pausing is a sound strategic tool, and although it became ubiquitous over the last two decades, that’s not a practice everywhere.
What strikes me is not how different the settings are, but how similar the underlying lesson remains under different circumstances. The instinct to push harder is a necessity when you’re in a Tower running competition, or a marathon - somewhere after the second half, closer to the finish line, there’s the understanding that this could be a test of pacing. You begin to appreciate how to conserve energy and to connect with your purpose, moving better after adjusting the rhythm of your breathing, and the analogy is true in enterprise leadership.
The future of work evolves with unexpected things, and for business services, what matters is not simply those who arrive first, but those who arrive prepared, present, and aligned. They are not performing urgency, but sustaining value, and far from glorifying speed, those runners are enabling coherence. There’s an understanding that the climb or the podium is irrelevant; that is not about how fast you ascend or get there, but how well you listen between the steps.
Alignment in an Agentic Era
We are now watching Enterprises entering an age of Agentic AI, where transformation will demand more than technological upgrades. That means an intentional rethinking of how people, processes, and pace where Business Service Leaders are asked to learn and slow down where it matters, creating space for mindful alignment instead of running fast toward artificial milestones.
Agentic AI adoption requires the unlearning of legacy assumptions about software, data, and organizational structures. That’s not about building faster, for instance, if companies want to have AI-ready data, multi-modal user experiences, and the shift from Software as a Service on Cloud, then they must build customized intelligence platforms, which could in turn deliver value when designed for clarity.
In this environment, speed is not an advantage, and strategic stillness fosters deeper listening and purpose emerging before technological decisions. The business strategy ahead of us is not just about who moves fastest, but those who will have the ability to learn, adapt, and keep listening along the way. To gain more excellent insights from our SSO Network, please join us for our upcoming Intelligent Document Processing Virtual Summit.