In a conversation on Wednesday evening, somebody used a phrase in passing: perhaps we just don’t metabolise our ideas. It stuck like a burr on a jumper, the kind that stays with you until you take it off for a closer look.
It’s been sitting with me ever since, because it names something that’s been bothering me about how we treat performance at work. We treat it as something in the past tense that we measure, rather than something we do in the present that is alive and vibrant. We have developed an obsession with metrics, efficiency and productivity that leaves little room for discovery, learning, recognition and joy, and we have allowed ourselves to build a culture that looks at only a tiny part of what an organisation is capable of.
Our default is to look back at what we have done and either celebrate the numbers or obsess over the lessons we need to learn to hit them. We fail to notice the impact we are having beyond the numbers, for good or otherwise, and we rarely consider how we did what we did or who it affected. The result is that many of the workplaces we experience and witness have become unnecessarily joyless places.
Consumption isn’t nourishment, and volume isn’t the same thing as performance. It is easy to end up on a bad diet, because an idea is precious, but is only metabolised when it is digested: when it changes our perspective, alters a decision, shows up in our own words, or lets us see something we could not see before.
When we go to too many meetings, scroll too much social media and take everything in faster, we consume but do not digest. We end up with cognitive and, quite often, spiritual indigestion.
We find ourselves full but without nourishment: we have read, watched and heard a great deal, yet appreciated little of it, and thought very little. An idea grabs our attention for a moment, but we have no time to work with it, and, undigested, we express it in other people’s phrases and language, which dilutes what we might otherwise uniquely contribute. If we haven’t digested what has gone before, we are only regurgitating, and so our judgement does not develop. We end up bloated with saved articles and notes. Christian Tietze calls this the collector’s fallacy: the belief that gathering is a form of knowing.
Metabolising ideas takes effort and balance. Memory consolidation depends substantially on sleep. Retention and development benefit from time, reflection and some form of journaling. Our working memory is small, able to hold only a few things at once, so overload comes easily, and switching tasks leaves part of our mind on the previous one, such that back-to-back meetings, or any run of attention-hungry activities, degrade each other.
In short, intake can be compressed, but metabolism cannot. It runs on time, sleep and reflection, which is exactly what a packed diary removes. We become so busy trying to please so many people, and so worried about how our performance will be judged, that we fail to perform in the moment, and we find ourselves looking at a recording of something we don’t remember creating.
It’s a waste. The people we work with need us to perform as only we can. When they work with us, they don’t care who we work for or who our shareholders are. They care how we change their life in the moment: how we make them feel, what we help them see, and whether they feel seen and heard.
The more we put intermediaries between ourselves and the people we serve, whether processes or AI, the harder it becomes to make them feel seen and heard. That work is hard. It involves friction, effort and consideration, and it limits scale. That, though, may be the advantage. Scarcity is valuable.
This week saw the publication of Ethan Mollick’s latest book, Co-Existence, which looks at our ever-evolving relationship with the broad church that is AI. It’s an excellent and provocative read. Recommended.
I find it difficult to be clear about my own relationship with AI. In many ways, AI is developing like a child: displaying the talents we hoped would be there, but then also a whole range of qualities whose origin we can’t quite place. What does seem clear is that it will eat, very quickly, the mediocrity of the processes many of us inhabit for the sake of scale, speed and cost. At the same time, it makes equally clear that there are areas where it cannot do the final mile. When it comes to deep knowledge, it doesn’t have the instinctive insight and judgement that our own expertise in a field gives us, the sense of what’s good and what’s dangerous. Nor is it good at the intuitive, wide-ranging knowledge that links one idea to another in a creative way, the kind born of experience, diversity and adventure.
And perhaps above all, it lacks taste. We see AI language everywhere now, and for those of us who work with it daily, it’s easy to see, and after a while it starts to feel distinctly tasteless. None of which is an argument against using it. It will help us research, test and recover ground at a hundred levels we haven’t managed before. But when it comes to presenting that work, taste, deep knowledge and wide knowledge matter, because otherwise we’re just selling the creative equivalent of cheap own-label sausages.
At a time when mass production has reached into every corner of the working world, from the production line to the professions to the arts, what’s becoming scarce is evidence of humanity.
The expressions of care, connection and craft are what sit at the heart of any economy; what we actually trade in is stories, meaning and purpose. Money, for all we’ve come to deify it, is just the token system we use to keep score, the same way AI runs on tokens of its own.
And the reality is that no matter how much effort we apply, the ideas of where we belong, the cultures we are part of, and the rules that have evolved to enable them, move far slower than the tools we are developing. Clearly, we are in a major transition that will shape the world we inhabit at every level, but it will happen over years, on nobody’s quarterly timeline, whatever investors in AI would like to think.
We have to adapt and change, and the terms should be ours rather than soulless capital’s.
We can make a choice to be performers, not performative.
A performance has no record until somebody is there to receive it: it happens, is felt, and is gone, which used to be the entire point, because it meant you had to show up to catch it. The performative version is staged the other way round, for later: made to be counted, screenshotted, cited as proof the work occurred. Most organisations now pay, overwhelmingly, for the second kind.
I don’t yet know what it would take to pay for presence rather than proof. That’s probably where I go next.
Have a great week. Go perform.