Speed Without Direction Is Just Noise
Reflections from my conversation with Tim Hughes on #TimTalk
A few years ago I was sitting in my kitchen at five in the morning. I love getting up early — though not usually that early — and I remember thinking, “What am I actually doing with myself?” I felt like I was running in a dozen directions and never getting anywhere.
Then a smaller, sharper question landed: who’s driving my calendar? During the week it’s me. On the weekend, honestly, it’s my wife. But the point stood — if I wasn’t deciding where my day went, something else was. Notifications were. Email was. That endless slot-machine pull of pings and beeps and “you’ve got mail.” I’d get to the end of the day, look back, and ask, “What did I get done?” Too often the honest answer was: I moved fast and went nowhere.
Coffee inspires action in my house — everything flows from that first cup — and somewhere in there the line showed up: speed without direction is just noise. I wrote it down. It became the through-line of my book, and it’s the idea Tim Hughes and I kept circling back to when I joined him on #TimTalk.
We didn’t lose direction. AI just exposed how little we had.
Everyone is sprinting toward AI right now. Every board, every executive says, “I want this initiative.” What almost nobody stops to ask is the simplest, most important question: what are we actually trying to solve? Where are we trying to go? What business case does this serve, and whose life does it make better?
If someone told you to jump off a bridge, you’d ask why. But we’re adopting AI without asking why all the time. And when you skip that question, the tools quietly become the strategy — and we already know how that ends. Everybody’s got Copilot, Claude, and a dozen apps they’re “trying out,” and nobody can say what business case any of it serves. I’ve seen this movie before. Years ago we called it IT sprawl. Today it’s AI sprawl. Same story, faster.
Here’s the harder truth I shared with Tim: AI doesn’t fix a broken culture. It exposes it — at about 10x. When a company’s culture is healthy, you can feel it; it’s tangible. When it’s fractured, people are already unsure which way they’re heading, and dropping AI into that fog doesn’t create clarity. It amplifies the confusion.
Back when I was a network engineer, we had a crude but effective test for whether a network actually worked: we ran games on it. Load up something demanding and you find out fast where it breaks. AI does the same thing to your organization. It surfaces the bad data, the weak governance, the exposed entry points, the places where nobody really owns the answer. And once it’s exposed, you can’t patch it at the end. You have to go back to the beginning of the problem.
Finding a compass, not another app
So how does a leader hold onto clear judgment while drowning in data, tools, and hype? For me it starts with reclaiming direction on purpose.
I think about it as a compass. North is your direction — your north star. East is what you allow in. South is where you actually focus. West is how you eliminate the noise. None of that works, though, unless you’re willing to live by your own calendar instead of letting email and text messages set your course. That’s the daily discipline: I own myself today. I own my direction today.
And when people ask for the one habit that helps them find their footing, my answer is almost embarrassingly simple. Before I open my email, I take two minutes with a cup of coffee and a little silence. It’s not meditation. It’s not a routine. It’s not another app. It’s just two minutes of being me, noticing what comes up, and setting a direction for the day before the world starts beeping at me. The rest of the day will try to pull me off course — it always does. But those two minutes are mine.
What machines will never do
If AI can write our emails, crunch our numbers, and analyze our data, what’s left for us? More than people think — and it’s the part that matters most.
Trust. Data is only as good as what you feed it, and trust takes years to build. I still live by my gut, because my gut tells me when something’s right or wrong.
Presence. AI is not going to be your presence. Sitting across from someone, sharing a moment, being seen and heard — that’s human, and it doesn’t automate.
Judgment. Machines can process everything. Humans decide what matters. AI can help you filter, but it can’t tell you what’s worth filtering for.
Mentorship. This is the one we’ve lost the most. Real mentorship is asking someone the same question three times over three months and watching how their answer grows. A lot of people are using AI as a counselor now, but it isn’t one — it’s reading back what it knows. The younger generation doesn’t need more advice generated on demand. They need someone to stand up and lead by how they live, the way my dad and stepdad taught me — never through speeches, always by letting me watch.
That’s why the human has to stay in the loop. We can let the machine handle the underlying work, but a person still owns the decision and the risk. Think of every leader who bet on a market the data said didn’t exist — the Walkman, the iPhone, half the world eventually running on Linux. The data wasn’t there. A human went and did something anyway.
Why I’m optimistic
Tim asked me a great closing question: what makes me optimistic about a world integrated with AI, assuming we keep our humanity intact? It sounds like a paradox, and maybe it is. But here’s what I believe: the more capable machines get, the more valuable human presence becomes.
Let that sit for a second. As AI rises and builds and grows, the scarce, differentiating things become trust, mentorship, and clarity — the human things. So the goal isn’t to keep up with the machines. It’s to stay human while they do what they do best. Humans have to be humans again, and machines have to be machines. When a human starts acting like a machine — copy, paste, react, repeat — that’s the problem. And a machine will never be human.
Set a direction. Turn off the noise. Let the machine handle the tasks. And remember that moving fast has never been the hard part. Knowing where you’re going is.
You can watch my full #TimTalk conversation with Tim Hughes here. If these ideas resonate, my book Finding Direction in the Age of AI: Leadership, Clarity, and Staying Human in a World Moving at Machine Speed is available on Amazon in print and Kindle. — Michael