AI is a Turbocharged Shovel
There’s a familiar feeling you get when you’re struggling.
Not quite drowning, but submerged. “Little” tasks piling up faster than you can possibly handle them. Pull requests demanding review. Slack threads multiplying like rabbits.
What do you do? Catch more balls mid-juggle, obviously. Move faster. Stack another thing on the pile.
It seems ok because everyone’s doing it.
The frenzy has a texture to it. The sense that the only answer to overwhelm is more. More output, more velocity, more agents running in parallel.
While everyone else is frantically working the deck, someone needs to climb the mast.
Climbing the mast is not “productive.” It’s not on any Jira ticket, but it’s essential to see if you’re still solving the right problems.
Here’s what I used to notice from up there: people aren’t talking to each other. They’re digging in parallel and in silence. They’re mistaking frantic motion for actual direction.
The bigger problem is that there will always be more sea. Thrashing around now just means you’re gassed for the next stretch.
Now, throw AI tools into the mix.
Engineers are built to solve problems. Once you’ve got one between your teeth, you want the next one. It becomes addictive.
AI tools will solve most problems you point them at. Then it’ll toss ten more at you for good measure.
It churns out code, drafts documents, crunches data, spits out architectural suggestions—all at mind-boggling speed.
The sheer volume AI produces upfront is colossal. What’s less obvious is the long tail of cognitive load that comes after. All that shiny new code still needs understanding, evaluating, and integrating.
And if you’re not paying attention, AI tools are a great way of helping you dig faster in the wrong direction.
You end up with turbocharged shovels, excavating your holes at breakneck speed.
The sea of information doesn’t get smaller—it floods higher. And still nobody’s climbing the mast.
The paradox of technology is familiar: tools that supposedly free up your time actually demand more judgment, not less. Someone still has to figure out what matters. What’s signal, what’s noise. Which problems deserve solving and which are just… problems being problems. (Bad news: there is no end to this.)
AI can’t detect when you’ve lost your bearings. Can’t sense the shift from strategic work to reactive flailing. Can’t tell you it’s time to stop digging.
That requires human leaders.
So what do you actually do about this?
When I’m working with someone who’s stuck in that frenzied state—sinking in a sea of AI-generated “solutions”, digging themselves deeper without thinking—I get them to turn 180 degrees and check in with their body.
If your thoughts are spinning in loops and you’re completely disconnected from your body, chances are you’re running a sympathetic nervous system response.
This isn’t inherently bad. It mobilises resources. But it also narrows your field of vision. You lose all perspective. You can’t see the mast, let alone climb it.
So check in with your body. Extend your exhales for 30 seconds. Feel that compulsion to keep surging forward. Let it exist without immediately acting on it.
It’s an intervention that usually feels woefully inadequate, yet remarkably effective when you actually do it. Your nervous system settles back down, and your vision widens out. You remember you actually have choices.
The best leaders I’ve worked with share the quality of being able to do this at a team level: they can feel when the team has shifted from thoughtful work into reactive scrambling mode. They catch the texture of the frenzy before it metastasizes into a full crisis.
This doesn’t mean leadership is about being calm and zen. It’s pattern recognition across human behavior, business context, technical reality—the whole messy picture.
It’s knowing when to stop producing outputs and start asking better questions.
AI fundamentally cannot do this. It exists in a permanent state of production. More suggestions, more code, more analysis, more options.
Leadership is recognising when more is absolutely the wrong answer.
When the sea stretches infinitely in all directions, going faster just means you drown quicker.
Climb the mast. Check your bearings. Let the wave wash over you.
Then—only then—decide which direction you’re actually sailing.