It’s kind of wild to come to realize that whatever it is we built for ourselves over the last hundred years might be the thing that’s crazy. Not me.

There’s some vindication in that.

That is all. Now back to our regularly programmed content.

In the final part of the “Soft” Stuff, we are speaking about collective intelligence.

The research almost nobody in corporate America has heard of

In 2010, a group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and a few others published a study in Science that should have landed, well, more so than it did.

They took 699 people (who was that one person that didn’t show up?!), put them into groups of two to five, and had them do all kinds of tasks: visual puzzles, brainstorming, moral reasoning, negotiating resources. The kind of work real teams actually do.

What they found was that a single statistical factor predicted how well a group performed across all of it. They called it the c-factor. Collective intelligence, quantified.

The interesting part is that the c-factor wasn’t strongly correlated with the average intelligence of the group members. It wasn’t correlated with the maximum individual intelligence either. The smartest person in the room didn’t predict how smart the room was.

What did predict it was three things:

1. Social sensitivity, measured by a test where you look at photographs of people’s eyes and try to guess what they’re feeling.

2. Whether people took turns talking, or whether one or two voices dominated.

3. And the proportion of women in the group, which turned out to be mostly a function of social sensitivity, since women tend to score higher on reading faces.

The findings have since been replicated across 22 studies with over 5,000 people; online, in person, and across cultures.

So, the thing that predicts whether your team can solve hard problems together isn’t the strategy or the number of hot shots in the room. It’s whether people can read each other’s faces, and whether they know when to zip it.

Why we’re embarrassed about this or at least should be

The research has been sitting there for fifteen years. And still, almost no organization I’ve ever worked with designed itself around it.

I think it’s because the finding is genuinely embarrassing.

We’ve spent a century optimizing for the individual. Standardized tests. Class rank. Resumes. Individual KPIs. Stack-ranked performance reviews. The lone-genius founder myth that won’t die no matter how many times the founder turns out to be terrible to work with.

We built entire professional identities around being the smartest person in the room. People have paid a lot of money for MBAs that confirmed this was the right thing to be.

And the research is gently telling us the room was never looking at that extra special smart person. It was looking at whether the room could think together.

A thing nature has known for about 400 million years

Last year at Climate Week in NYC, working with the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders, myself and some other colleagues held a working session on Nature Based Leadership. In developing frameworks for this work, how groups of animals and organisms make collective decisions, look a lot like the c-factor.

Honeybees, when they need to choose a new hive, send out scouts. The scouts search independently, come back, and do a waggle dance whose intensity signals the quality of what they found. The swarm reaches consensus quickly through quorum sensing, based on a set threshold of bees’ votes. No leader. No CEO bee. No luxurious 3-day offsite to come to unanimous consensus, just a good old fashion dance party with whoever could make it.

Thomas Seeley at Cornell has spent decades studying this and once said that honeybees have taught him a lot about how to run faculty meetings. Bees have been doing collective decision-making for roughly 30 million years, “so they’ve had lots of chances for failing systems to get pruned out by natural selection.”

Suzanne Simard’s research on forests shows that trees share carbon and send chemical warning signals to each other through mycorrhizal fungal networks under the soil. When the network is intact, the signals travel. When researchers cut the network, the signals stop and the forest gets measurably dumber.

The intelligence isn’t in the tree. It’s in the connections between trees.

What researchers found in a psychology lab in 2010 is essentially what ecologists have been finding in forests and beehives for decades.

Intelligence, in any living system, is a property of relationships. Not a property of individuals.

We are, embarrassingly, the last species to write a peer-reviewed paper about it.

Why we’re so bad at collective intelligence

The c-factor isn’t hard in the sense that it requires advanced training. The mechanics aren’t complicated: read the room, take turns, notice what’s being said underneath what’s being said.

So why are we this bad at something a honeybee can pull off?

The capacities that build collective intelligence all require a more open, community-oriented mindset. Reading a face means actually looking at someone, acknowledging them as equal. Taking turns means letting go of the next thing you were going to say. Noticing what a colleague isn’t saying means being willing to feel something uncomfortable on their behalf. And all of it requires a lack of knowing, in front of other people. Ekk, being vulnerable!

Coming from the United States, individualism is so deeply ingrained in us, you would think each one of us was born in a log cabin on a prairie, pulling ourselves up by our boot straps. And our systems continue to reiterate those values. School trained us to raise our hands, not talk to each other. Group work was something you got graded on individually. The highest performers were the ones who had the answer first, not the ones who helped the group get there together. Corporate life then refined this into an art form. Meetings became performances to demonstrate your individual value.

Hierarchy hasn’t helped either. And the person with the most power in the room did the most talking, and everyone else’s job was to nod strategically.

I once sat in a leadership meeting where a senior leader told us, without irony, that he had “already pre-aligned” with everyone individually so the meeting could go faster.

We had eight hours blocked for a strategy session and he had pre-decided the strategy.

What we call collaboration is often a series of individual performances stitched together and called a team. We are not actually thinking together. We are taking turns performing, and calling the rehearsed script a meeting.

And the research is telling us that this is why most of our meetings feel soul crushing. Because they are. I can say for myself I went into a particular line of work to make a difference. If my opinion isn’t apart of the mix, what’s the point? On the c-factor scale, what we’re doing together is measurably worse than thinking alone would be.

Where AI fits into all of this (unclear)

I don’t think anyone has a clean answer yet for where AI belongs when it comes to human team dynamics and where it doesn’t. What we do know is that the research on AI and collective intelligence is… not great.

A 2024 study from Northeastern found that mere exposure to AI in a task changes how humans subsequently interact with other humans. Shared language, shared attention, social cohesion all shifted.

Another study at Columbia found that when an AI agent was added to a team, the humans showed increased pupil dilation, blinked more, talked less, and performed worse than all-human teams. Their bodies registered something their words didn’t have a way to name.

None of this means AI is useless. It means we haven’t intentionally designed what role it plays and what role it does not (which we should by the way), and with it rapidly evolving at warp speed, we are going to be redesigning that for a while.

So how do we practice building back collective intelligence?

Building on the three criteria that increases the c-factor, some scientifically proven ways to build it back:

Track who’s talking. And say something. The equality of conversational turn-taking is one of the three measurable predictors of whether a group can think. This isn’t about being polite. It’s about the measurable intelligence of the room. In any meeting that matters, notice who hasn’t spoken and make room for them. If one or two voices are dominating, I hate to say the group is getting dumber in real time.

Hire for social sensitivity, not just individual brilliance. This one is harder than it sounds, because we’ve spent decades building hiring processes designed to measure exactly the opposite. But the research is clear: a team of merely-smart people who can read each other will outperform a team of brilliant people who can’t. The question isn’t whether someone is the smartest candidate. It’s whether they make the room smarter.

Take your team somewhere with no agenda. The same research on downtime and the default mode network from Part 4 applies at a group level. Collective intelligence requires humans actually noticing each other, and most corporate environments prevent that. Forest, trail, beach, anywhere the phones don’t work. See what happens.

What this series has actually been about

When I started the “Soft” Stuff series, I thought I was writing about four things AI can’t replace. Presence. Embodiment. Imagination. Collective intelligence.

I see now that they’re not really four things. They’re one thing, looked at from four angles.

Presence is about being here.

Embodiment is about feeling what’s here.

Imagination is about seeing what could be here.

And collective intelligence is about being here together.

Four capacities, all pointing at the same fact: we are analog creatures. We have bodies. We have nervous systems that know things our brains don’t. We have the ability to feel a room shift, to daydream our way into an answer, to read each other’s faces for what isn’t being said.

These are the capacities we spent decades being ashamed of. They got coded as feminine, soft, unserious. They got trained out of us in school and deprioritized at work. We built our entire professional selves around being the opposite of them.

And now, in a moment where AI can do the analytical work we contorted ourselves to become good at, the capacities we suppressed are the ones with any real value left.

Funny how that works.

I don’t think the path forward is to abandon AI or to go back to a pre-digital fantasy. AI is here. It’s going to keep getting better at the things it’s good at and corporations are going to continue to use it to optimize. But these truly human capabilities, the part AI can’t do or not nearly as well, will continue to allow us to differentiate ourselves in a rapidly changing world.

And it’s the stuff we are going to need to double down on to build a better world together.

That’s the soft stuff. Which in reality is not all that soft, load-bearing all along, actually.

Thank you for reading this series. It’s been genuinely clarifying to write, which I didn’t entirely expect. If any of it resonates, I’d love to hear which part and why. And if you’ve been quietly doing this work in your own life, I’d love to hear about that too.

The next question I’m sitting with is what happens when you take all of this seriously at the organizational level. What it would actually look like to build companies as living systems, not metaphors. That’s where I’m heading next. In the meantime, go stare at a tree or plant one for that matter, it is almost Earth Day after all.

Glitter.
Sigh, we are in trouble.

Which gets us to today’s topic.

The year I stopped having ideas

Looking back, I’m not sure how to explain how intellectually flat I was in the last stretch of my consulting career. The constant stress, having a family, the relentless pace of life, it was like I was too tired to be curious. I’d always thought of myself as someone who loved to share random useless facts just for the sake of joy. And then one day I noticed I just… didn’t.

Turns out that tracks with the research. Because what I’d unknowingly done was eliminate every condition under which imagination actually operates.

Your brain’s imagination hardware is on when you’re “doing nothing”

Here’s the thing about imagination that no one told us in school, or at work, or basically anywhere in professional life: the brain does its most creative work when it’s not focused on a task.

The default mode network, which I touched on in Part 2 when we talked about presence, is the brain system that activates when you stop concentrating on something external. It’s been called the “imagination network” by researchers, and for good reason. It’s responsible for mental time travel, future thinking, empathy, and making unexpected connections. It’s essentially the engine of original thought.

And it runs on downtime. Walks. Staring at your plants. Picking at your toes. The stuff we’ve been systematically eliminating from our workdays for decades.

Daydreaming accounts for 30–50% of our waking hours and research suggests it’s not wasted time. The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought found that highly creative people only do focused work for about 4–5 hours a day. The rest? Walking. Staring into space. Letting the mind simmer in the beauty of life. That is all part of the work, doing absolutely nothing particularly useful.

So why are we ashamed of it?
Because we built a system that said we should be.

The education system’s intended purpose was never for developing imagination. It was designed to produce reliable, attentive workers for an industrial economy. Sit still. Stay on task. Stop picking your nose. Follow instructions. Produce measurable output. The wandering mind, the exact mental state that generates imagination, was recast as a discipline problem. And with neurodivergent children, the same cognitive patterns that correlate strongly with creativity were pathologized, medicated, and corrected toward conformity.

Unfortunately, we still haven’t updated the model. We just carried those norms, focus is virtue, wandering is failure, productivity is the measure of a person, straight into our workplaces. And then we built performance management systems, open-plan offices, back-to-back calendars, and Slack notifications to make sure no one’s mind could wander even if they wanted it to.

The leadership implication no one is talking about

An interesting study by Dartmouth found that when imagining near-term, familiar scenarios, the brains of creative experts and non-creative people look basically identical. But when imagining distant scenarios, far-off futures, people unlike themselves, situations outside their direct experience, creative experts activate a completely different neural system. One associated with empathy. With modeling other people’s inner worlds.

The researchers expected creative people to use the same system as everyone else, just more efficiently. Instead, they found a different system entirely.

For a minute, let’s think about what we are asking of our mostly non-creative leaders right now. “Imagine a future that doesn’t exist yet.” “Build for a world you haven’t seen.” That's not a strategy exercise. That's asking them to use a creative capacity that develops through practice. And most of us have spent the last twenty years in organizations specifically designed to atrophy it.

Organizations have an imagination deficit. And they built it themselves.

Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends survey of 14,000 leaders across 95 countries found that 73% say it’s important to keep human capabilities pace with AI, but just 9% say they’re making progress. They called it an “imagination deficit.”

I’d go further: it’s not a deficit they stumbled into. It’s one they engineered.

Research consistently shows creativity is positively associated with joy, curiosity, and psychological safety, and negatively associated with fear, anxiety, and the threat of ridicule. Now, what do most organizations run on? Fear of making mistakes. Fear of senior leadership. Fear of looking stupid in a meeting. The culture itself is actively suppressing the capacity it desperately wants and needs.

Meanwhile, the dominant message with the introduction of AI is, ‘Great! Now you will be able to get things done even faster!’ Which is, neurologically speaking, the exact opposite of what produces imagination. Efficiency is the enemy of the wandering mind. And the wandering mind is where new ideas come from.

At least for now, AI has no resting state, no wandering, no aha moment that wakes them in the middle of the night. It generates by predicting patterns, which can look creative, but it’s backward-looking by design. It generates by predicting patterns from what already existed. The weird, unscheduled, apparently pointless meandering that produces genuinely new ideas? Still stubbornly human. For now. And even if AI can do this in the future, that sure as hell won’t stop me from doing it too..

So how do you actually build it back?

The good news is imagination isn’t gone, it’s just been starved of the conditions it needs. I can hear yours right now, ‘Help meeee’. Here’s what science actually supports:

Schedule undemanding time. Literally put it in your calendar. Not meditation, not journaling, those require focus. The kind that works is genuinely low-demand: a walk without a podcast, a commute without your phone, twenty minutes of staring at the ceiling. Research on the default mode network shows that unstructured, undemanding activity is when the imagination network activates and starts making the unexpected connections that produce original thought. If it’s not in the calendar, it won’t happen. We’re too well-trained.

Spend time in nature, even briefly. Research suggests that time in natural environments creates gentle shifts between soft external fascination and internally-oriented mind wandering, which is essentially the perfect cocktail for imagination. The theory, called Attention Restoration Theory, is that nature doesn’t demand the same kind of directed cognitive effort that screens, cities, and meetings do. It gives the brain’s executive function a break, which frees up the imagination network to do its thing. Even short exposures help, particularly when you’re mentally fatigued — which, if you’ve been in back-to-back meetings, you are.

Pick up a hobby that has nothing to do with your job. This one has stronger research behind it than you might expect. An international study found that people who regularly pursue creative hobbies show brain patterns that appear younger than their actual age. Dancing, yarn bombing, painting, competitive duck herding, even after just 30 hours of creative training, participants’ brain clocks ticked backward, showing a reduction of brain age between two and three years. Creative hobbies engage multiple brain networks simultaneously, keeping the connections flexible and efficient. And critically: “You do not need to be an expert to benefit from creativity,” Smithsonian Magazine lead researcher noted. The point isn’t to be good at it. The point is to do something where your brain has to make new connections rather than execute familiar ones.

What was really wild about my last year in consulting, is how I didn’t even notice that my creativity wasn’t there anymore, until I left.

The rewilding I’ve been personally doing, the extra-long dog walks, the time in my garden constantly battling the onslaught of aphids, the deliberate unscheduling — wasn’t just about rest. It was, without my fully knowing it, about restoring the conditions under which imagination operates.

I learned you can’t think your way into new ideas. You have to create the space for them.

We’ve spent decades measuring the wrong thing. Optimizing for outputs while quietly destroying the process that makes original outputs possible. And now we’re surprised that organizations can’t imagine their way forward.

Imagination isn’t the soft stuff. It’s the hardware. We just built workplaces that unplug it because it doesn’t have a clear ROI.

Next up: Collective Intelligence. The one where we stop pretending that the smartest person in the room is the answer. Until next time!

In my last piece, I wrote about presence, about the uncomfortable reality that most of us aren’t absent because we don’t know how to pay attention but because being fully here means seeing things we’d rather not see.

But presence is only the first step.

Because once you actually see what’s happening, you have to feel it.

And that’s where we start today, with embodiment or somatic intelligence.

I’ll be the first to admit that I hate to feel my feelings.

My mother taught me well, and I became very good at sucking it up and moving on. Sure, sometimes it leaked out like an overfilled Tupperware you’re trying to seal, getting stuff all over your hands no matter how hard you press the lid down.

(Now that I think about it…this might explain all of my oversharing….)

But unresolved trauma gives you the motivation to work hard, right? Why would I want that to go away?

Well as you can imagine that only served me for so long before the leaky Tupperware turned into a broken dam flooding my nervous system with all of the feelings I chose to shove away for decades.

Which brings us to something we’ve largely forgotten.

Our modern culture treats intelligence as something that lives almost entirely in the brain.

Somatic intelligence is your ability to accurately sense, interpret, and regulate internal bodily signals and use that information to guide behavior.

But long before we tried to think our way through everything, entire systems spanning thousands of years were built around a different assumption:

The body already knows.

There is a magic to the body and increasingly science is catching up to the intelligence it holds.

According to neuroscience, interoception, defined as your brain’s ability to sense and interpret body signals, think heart rate, breath, gut, etc., gets interpreted by your brain and become your feelings.

The better interoceptive awareness or your brain’s ability to accurately read your body, the better you are at emotional regulation, decision-making, self-awareness and even intuition.

In my case, I had worked my whole life to suppress my body’s signals and my brain’s interpretation of them that I no longer knew up from down.

The good news for all of us somatic novices out there, interoceptive ability can be trained. Hallelujah!

Which is how I ended up lying on a yoga mat, hyperventilating on purpose, surrounded by strangers, crying. As one does.

I started a monthly high-ventilation breathwork practice partly out of curiosity, partly because someone I trusted recommended it, and partly because my nervous system was clearly not going to sort itself out on its own.

If you’ve never done high-ventilation breathwork, let me paint you a picture.

You’re on a mat, on the floor, breathing faster and deeper than feels normal or even advisable. Within minutes your hands start to tingle. Your jaw might clench and your hands get stuck in a “lobster claw” position. Things get a little intense. And then, if you let it, something starts to shift.

The thinking mind, the one that’s always planning and solving and making PowerPoints about its own life (guilty), gets quiet. Not because you told it to. But because your nervous system has essentially taken the wheel.

And that’s when things get interesting.

For me, sessions usually involve some crying. Sometimes a lot of crying. Not sad crying exactly, more like the kind of release that happens when you’ve been holding something for so long you forgot you were holding it. The Tupperware finally opens. Deliberately this time.

But here’s the part I didn’t expect.

A few sessions in, somewhere between the hyperventilating and the ugly crying, a thought arrived. Not one I went looking for. Not one I’d been consciously working on. Just, there. Clear and certain in a way my analytical brain rarely manages: I need to build something that brings this into corporate leadership. Combined with nature. This is the missing piece.

I almost laughed out loud on the mat.

Here I was, supposedly releasing my corporate life, and my nervous system had gone ahead and handed me a business strategy.

But that’s exactly the point. That’s somatic intelligence. Not a feeling you have to chase or manufacture. Just information, arriving through the body, bypassing the overthinking, landing with a kind of quiet authority that no spreadsheet has ever managed.

The body already knew. I just had to get out of my head long enough to hear it.

This is what intuition actually is, by the way.

Not magic. Not a personality trait some people have and others don’t. But the accumulated intelligence of your body, pattern recognition running below the level of conscious thought, shaped by every experience you’ve ever had, delivered as a feeling before your brain has time to explain it.

We’ve spent decades treating intuition as the unreliable cousin of logic. Something to mention quietly and then back up with data. But the science of interoception suggests something different: that your body is processing information your conscious mind hasn’t caught up to yet. The gut feeling isn’t noise. It’s a signal.

And here’s where AI comes in.

AI is extraordinarily good at pattern recognition. It can process more data than any human brain, faster, with fewer errors. In many ways it already outperforms us analytically, which is exactly what Part 1 of this series was about.

But AI doesn’t have a body.

AI has no nervous system registering threat or safety. No gut tightening when something feels off. No chest expanding when something feels right. It cannot feel the energy shift in a room, sense that a colleague is struggling beneath a polished presentation, or know, the way you sometimes just know, that a decision is wrong before you can articulate why.

That embodied intelligence, messy, nonlinear, felt rather than computed, is not a bug in our human operating system.

It’s the whole feature.

In Part 1, I wrote about how the capacities AI can’t replace are the ones we spent decades suppressing. In Part 2, we looked at presence and how being fully here means feeling things we’ve trained ourselves to avoid. Embodiment is what comes next. It’s what presence makes possible. When you’re actually in your body, actually here, the intelligence that lives there becomes available to you.

The question is whether we’re willing to trust it.

The good news is that interoceptive ability can be trained. And you don’t need a yoga mat and a room full of strangers to start, though I highly recommend it if you can swing it. Here are three science-backed ways to begin building your somatic intelligence today:

Next week, we will dig into imagination in part 4 of our series, which I’d argue is the capacity we’ve most thoroughly beaten out of ourselves in the name of productivity. And the one we might need most right now.

See you there.

I used to think I was pretty good at presence. At work, I came to the meetings, enjoyed the small talk, made a compelling impression.

But it turns out I was just a really good performer.

After fifteen years in a career in sustainability and a somewhat shocking ADHD diagnosis, I came to realize I’d been playing the most run of the mill tv characters, Successful Work Lady #3.

My high school theater teacher would be very disappointed… Sorry Sherri.

I hadn’t been showing up. I’d been reading the room, editing myself down, and delivering exactly what leadership was comfortable with: smaller, sharper, less feeling, more machine. I got so good at it that I didn’t notice the atrophy until a doctor put a name to it.

But what I’ve been sitting with since then isn’t embarrassment or shame about the performance. It’s grief.

Grief is not exactly what you would expect when it comes to work emotions. It sounds dramatic, maybe a little over the top. Like something you feel after a loved ones passing, not during a Tuesday stand-up.

But its grief you end up feeling when you finally stop performing and actually look at what’s in front of you.

Because when you’re really present, not nodding-and-typing present, but actually here, you start to see things. The pace that was never sustainable. The version of work that was supposed to feel meaningful and mostly didn’t. The quiet, accumulated loss of fifteen years of editing yourself down to fit.

And underneath all of that, something more diffuse: grief for a world that was supposed to make sense if you just worked hard enough. Grief for the rules of a game that changed while we were playing it.

“We have built entire professional cultures around the performance of presence — the nodding, the multitasking, the looking busy — while the actual capacity to be here quietly atrophied.”

This is why presence is hard. Not because we’re lazy or distracted — though we are those things too sometimes. But because being present means coming into contact with loss. And we are, most of us anyway, carrying more of it than we’ve had time to name.

The neuroscience is real: your brain has a default mode that runs on autopilot, and an executive control network that requires effort. The first one is the default. We live there. And over time, the disconnection compounds, it’s part of why so many people feel burned out even when they are still technically getting everything done.

But I think the deeper reason we avoid presence isn’t neurological. It’s protective.

Staying on autopilot means you don’t have to feel the gap between the work you wanted to be doing and the work actually ended up in. Between the leader you imagined becoming and the one who is just keeping it together. Between the slower pace of life that you hoped you would be allowed to have by now, god damnit, and the one you’re actually living.

Presence collapses that gap. And that can feel less like a gift and more like a punch to the face.

Which is, I think, why it matters so much right now — and why it shows up first in this series.

We are being asked to navigate enormous uncertainty: AI rewriting the rules on work, institutions pressure-testing under strain, climate change making our winters feel like summer. And the playbook we’ve been following: work just a little longer, be just a little better, make just one more spreadsheet, just got blown up by the machines themselves.

What’s left is the stuff we were told didn’t count, some of our most basic human characteristics: be in your body, be silly and creative, work together.

But you can’t access any of those from autopilot. You have to actually be here first.

So I want to offer something slightly different than a practice.

Not because practices don’t matter, they do, but because I think the first step isn’t a mind-blowing new technique I have created. It’s permission.

Permission to let the grief be there when you stop. Permission to notice what you’ve been carrying without immediately trying to fix, reframe, or optimize it. Permission to stay, even for a few seconds longer than feels comfortable, with what’s actually true.

The 30-second version: once a day, stop. Close your eyes if you can. Ask yourself what’s actually here — not what should be here, not what you’re trying to get to. Just what is. And when something uncomfortable surfaces, try not to move away from it immediately.

That’s it. No resolution required.

Until Part 3, next week, of course. I’m not letting you off that easy.

Because I think the capacity to stay with difficulty, to be present even when what we see is hard, is the thing that makes everything else possible. It’s how we metabolize loss instead of just accumulating it. And in a world asking more of us than ever, that capacity might be the most quietly radical thing we can build.

As you might imagine, I do a lot of thinking over here.
Thinking about what I’m going to do with my life.
Thinking about the state of the world.
And thinking about eating cake, probably more often than I should be.

But as I’ve been trying to figure out what’s next for me, I can’t stop thinking about what comes next for all of humanity. After all, it’s always easier to try to solve a much bigger problem than your own (healthy coping mechanisms, clearly).

We are living in wild times: AI rewriting the rules of work, a mental health crisis nobody wants to fully face, and geopolitical tensions pressure-testing our global systems. Whether it’s an oil chokepoint or a chatbot, the systems we built for a stable, predictable world are colliding with a moment they weren’t designed for.

And so are we.

Some people are building prepper kits. And honestly, they’re not wrong. Zip ties do have a lot of uses. There’s something appealing about the idea of not needing anyone. It fits perfectly with our deeply individualistic culture.

Believe me, my husband would be the first to sign up and probably the most successful of them all.

But on a planet of 8.3 billion people, that’s a fantasy.

The playbook we’ve all been following has been clear:
Be smarter.
Be faster.
Be more efficient.
Be more like a machine.

And then, of course, along comes AI… and blows that all up.

So, what do we actually need now?

Not better optimization.
Not more data.

But the capacity to navigate uncertainty - together.

Which requires the very human capabilities we’ve spent decades undervaluing:

Presence. Embodiment. Imagination. Collective intelligence.

I have to laugh a little, because the things that make us irreplaceable today are the same things our culture has dismissed as “soft.” You know, important, but not that important.

Entire industries (including the one I came from) have spent decades telling leaders to be more rational, more consistent, more data-driven.

And to be fair, that worked.
Until it didn’t.

We’re already seeing it.
The work we were trained to excel at - analyzing, synthesizing, producing - is being done faster and cheaper by machines.

So teams double down. More outputs. More speed. More optimization.

And yet… the quality of decisions isn’t improving.

Because the bottleneck was never the work.

It was always the human capacity to sit with ambiguity, to imagine something new, to feel confident in a decision and to actually align with other people.

The “soft” stuff.
The part we assumed didn’t matter, because we didn’t know how to measure it.

Looking back, I carried a lot of shame around being drawn to the “soft” stuff. I thought it made me less credible, less serious. So I hardened. Because we all know what it takes, especially as a woman, to be taken seriously.

Well… look at me now. I might be jumping the gun here but HA HA!

And if I spent over ten years suppressing this stuff in some of the most prestigious corporate environments in the world, I’m guessing I’m not alone.

So the real question becomes: How do we build them back?

In the next four pieces, I’m going to go deep into each one. Presence. Embodiment. Imagination. Collective Intelligence. What they actually are, why they atrophied, and how we build them back.

Not because I love giving hugs.

But because I think this is the whole new game.