Lately, I’ve been aware of a small shift in my response to the conversation about AI.

Another article appears. Another prediction about what will change, accelerate, disappear. The language gathers speed and the stakes are framed as immediate.

I begin reading, and then I feel myself sit back – not physically, but internally – as if the urgency is moving past without quite landing.

It took me a moment to understand that response.
It was not disengagement, it was a kind of fatigue. And what feels tiring is not the innovation, it is the compression. The insistence that this moment stands alone, that it requires some kind of astonishment; that a position must be formed quickly.

And that fatigue has me thinking about leadership in seasons like this.
Because when I slow the pace and widen the frame, something else becomes visible.

In the fifteenth century, as the printing press began circulating texts beyond monasteries and courts, authority shifted in ways that felt destabilising. Knowledge multiplied, interpretation expanded and institutional control loosened. The press didn’t simply produce books – it changed how societies organised truth.

The anxiety that followed was real and understandable. The structure of information – and the power that accompanies it – had been rearranged.

What steadied that era was not enthusiasm alone, nor resistance, it was time.  With time, new forms of discernment emerged – more nuanced ways of reading, evaluating and interpreting – as human judgement adapted to the new abundance.

Technological movement was swift; human adaptation and cultural integration was slower.

There is often a period in which noise grows louder before coherence returns, and in such periods the work of leadership is to hold the centre.

When I remember this, my position softens – the external complexity remains, yet my stance within it shifts.

My own research echoes this: leaders’ interpretations shape collective experience. The meanings we assign to events do not remain private, they circulate and become the psychological and emotional climate that others experience.

In moments of acceleration, our most influential act may be less about prediction and more about steadying.

So I am beginning to trust this fatigue, understanding it as a form of holding – a small step back from the swell of urgency, a movement away from fascination and toward deeper knowing.

Leadership, across centuries of change, has asked for similar capacities: steadiness when narratives polarise; discernment when information multiplies; perspective when certainty gathers too quickly.

The tools evolve, and the human work of orienting wisely within change continues.

Perhaps the invitation is not to decide what we think about AI just yet.

Perhaps it is to notice how we are holding it – and to hold a steady centre for others.