Being First vs. Being Right.

The Need to Reflect. Refocus. Re-engage. in the AI Age.

Sometimes a songwriter will write a track entirely for themselves, with no audience in mind, just to make sense of something heavy they are holding in their mind or spirit. That is what this post is for me.

I am not writing this to definitively solve every single matter related to AI. Rather, it is an effort to put my thoughts out there and actively work through my own perspective on a massive shift in how we live and work. My position on this is not fixed. We are living through a period of extreme acceleration, and every human right now is grappling with how to catch up to a train that has already left the station. If I remain an audience of one for this post in trying to make sense of that, I am perfectly fine with it.

Right now, there is a massive flurry of information competing for our attention, vacillating between two exhausted extremes: the existential panic that algorithms will end the world, and the hyper-capitalist rush to replace every human role with a large language model to inflate profit margins.

With all that noise, we need to stop just reacting to single development that unfolds around us - often in real time - and start understanding why it is happening, whether this is part of something greater that has happened before, to then articulate a thoughtful path forward.

The Cult of Being First

This panic around AI is directly connected to how corporate culture - and modern society more generally - has approached almost everything for the past two decades. To quote Denzel Washington, we are more preoccupied with being first than we are with being right.

Humanity has a consistent track record of introducing new technology into society out of a sheer desire to innovate and be first. We build the tool and deploy it long before we have fully grappled with its human impact—good or bad. Organizations chase the newest trend, making wholesale cuts to their workforces to appease the market. But they ignore the deep human impact. Rampant unemployment yields a negative systemic value that completely cancels out any immediate, short-term benefit of replacing those individuals' roles with an algorithm.

Our Collective Fiction

In my workshops, I socialize with professionals the concept of cultivating their creative minds when their data-driven approaches hit a wall. Yet, when organizations face a disruption like AI, they suddenly act as if they are facing an unprecedented alien invasion.

Organizations get so caught up in the idea of how unique they are that they completely abandon historical precedent. They stop applying established best practices to work through the problem. Because they believe their specific operational context is the exception to the rule, they lose the plot entirely.

Pulling on a thread within the concept of plots: If you want to go down the rabbit hole of the pros and cons of what could happen with AI, the roadmap already exists. Widely respected historical fiction on technological innovation—like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, or George Orwell’s 1984, the Dune series—alongside broadcast and cinematic explorations like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica (the 2000’s edition), Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, or Spike Jonze's Her, have already explored this territory in interesting ways.

Maybe the insights required to navigate the future have already been quantified by our artists and deep thinkers. In my work, I have found that the true “third way” forward through any problem is found by mixing two distinct channels: the intuitive connections of the creative subconscious and the hard signal of empirical data. We just need to take a beat, process the lessons, and re-calibrate our approach, before leaping into reactive action.

Workplaces Are Terrible Classrooms

We don't need to guess about the uncertainty and contradictory dynamics unfolding in our workplaces. Gallup confirms that half of the U.S. workforce is now using AI, with 65% of those users reporting direct productivity gains. However, the expectation of systemic disruption is widespread—75% of adults predict this technology will permanently eliminate jobs over the next decade.

AI is currently acting as a high-speed accelerant for basic efficiency, not an architectural shift. Despite the velocity of adoption, evidence that it has fundamentally re-engineered how work actually gets done remains incredibly limited.

Why? Because enterprise AI adoption appears to work best when it complements existing human workflows and when managers actively champion its use. I’d argue many managers may be struggling to understand what they are championing.

This is where we repeatedly crash into the same structural wall: modern workplaces are fundamentally terrible environments for intentional learning and growth. We expect people to navigate a new innovation that fundamentally shifts the status quo of work in environments that offer absolutely zero operational headroom to do so thoughtfully and in our unique way of processing information, taking action, or related to others. Reflect on recent economic or social shifts workplaces have faced and how many organizations have confused reactive or performative actions with thoughtful responses that can sustain the change any workplace truly needs. Simply - organizations don’t make sufficient time to truly learn, much less effectively apply that learning.

Consider this: If your organization’s mode of operating is already disconnected from the human dynamics that actually run the business, no algorithm is going to save you.

The Ground-Level Impact

In my 1:1 executive coaching sessions, I am currently navigating these inflection points with emerging leaders in the digital marketing space and senior creative directors at agencies and studios.

These are professionals who built their careers owning the full lifecycle of creative output. Now, they are finding themselves marginalized. Not because the AI's work product is actually more creative, but simply because it is delivered more efficiently.

There is another danger I am seeing on the ground: the algorithmic echo chamber. At their worst, AI assistants seem to be engineered to continually affirm what you want to see, validating your existing points of view without pushback. This mimics a very human, structural failure that I have written about previously. When a leader leans exclusively into their natural talents without understanding or mitigating their blindspots, they create outsized friction with the people trying to collaborate with them. AI replicates this dynamic at scale. It validates your blindspots and gives you the illusion of competence without the friction of dissent.

Now, let me be completely transparent: many of the images accompanying my blog posts are either AI manipulations of my own photos or entirely AI-generated. AI is the grammar check on my text because simple spell-check is a thing of the past. Its integration into everyday productivity apps is ubiquitous.

Here is what I’ve come to understand about about what this technology actually does:

It is not producing better, more creative or insightful work. Rather, it delivers more consistently, and it iterates more quickly and efficiently.

If you want to produce something genuinely creative—something that resonates with another human being—you still have to put in the time, get in the reps. Create a safe space for yourself to try things, be willing to produce something not so good - to fail - to then understand when you have created something truly good.

What is the precise calibration of ingredients that makes something good? That is where your unique M.O., your specific taste, and your human judgment come into play.

The Filter

We all have unique ways of taking action, communicating, navigating thought, and building relationships. Through all of this disruption, do not lose sight of or compromise what makes you you.

Stop marketing your tools, and start marketing yourself. Use your unique human wiring as the filter through which you discern the pros and cons of adopting any new technology—for yourself, and for the people depending on you.

…and remember to take a beat to Reflect, Refocus, and Re-engage.


—- Nick @throughcollective