Leaders who pause see further

You can't find signal if all you see is noise.

If there’s one thing I can tell you about the current moment, it’s this:

Most of it got baked in weeks, months, and years ago.

It’s easy to get pulled into the swirl of the urgent and lose sight of the important. You already know what it’s like to get constant notifications, to manage a bulging inbox, to believe that the next meeting and the one after it are critically, essentially important. That’s your brain focusing in on today stuff.

But most of it is noise, not signal.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile and The Black Swan, notes that the frequency with which data is observed significantly impacts the ratio of noise to signal. And notifications and meetings are observation. Frequent, incessant.

Noisy.

Three things to consider:

1. When we look at data such as stock prices or economic indicators on a daily basis, the ratio tends to be 95% noise and 5% signal. Mostly noise.

2. Examined on a yearly basis, that ratio is about 50-50. Still half noise.

3. On an hourly basis, it’s 99.5% noise and 0.5% signal. Almost entirely noise.

When we get input, we react emotionally to noise, and we make decisions that way.

That matters for the way we live day to day. If you know that most of what happens in a given day or hour doesn’t actually matter, how can you get a better sense of signal?

I’ve been eating my own dog food on this one. I noticed that I was getting pulled into a thousand things I could react to each day, and it was getting really noisy. But I remembered how to right the ship.

It’s simple and counterintuitive:

Pause.

The illusion of linear time

Someone told me when I first became a parent: “The days are long and the years are short.” That goes to the heart of how we experience time. Most of us wake up, go to work, have our meetings, make our things, spend time with family and friends, then get up the next day and do it again.

The rhythm makes today feel permanent. We assume tomorrow will be like today.

Except it won’t.

We focus on what’s urgent right now. That focus keeps us from noticing the movements creating this moment. What’s happening now was determined months ago.

The decisions being made today about roles, org structures, and who stays and who goes? Those aren’t reactions to today’s reality. They’re the inevitable outcomes of intentions and investments made many months ago that most of us didn’t pause long enough to see coming.

What accumulates while we’re busy

Last summer, I got curious about a question everyone had a confident answer to: “When will AI really change the workforce?” Most people said three to four years. That timeline felt off to me, so I did something counterintuitive—I paused. I stopped reacting to the daily news cycle and started looking at what had been accumulating underneath it.

I looked at leading indicators from 12-18 months prior: infrastructure investments, job descriptions, executive statements, procurement patterns. Things that had already happened but hadn’t yet produced visible effects.

The pattern was clear: Q1 2026. Not three to four years. Six months.

When mobile banking showed similar leading indicators, bank tellers dropped 30% within 18 months. When cloud computing showed those signals, on-premise IT dropped by similar amounts in the same timeframe. The lag between investment and impact is consistent. We just don’t notice it because we’re watching the daily noise instead of the yearly signal.

I’m not sharing this to make predictions about the future. I’m sharing it because it illustrates something about how time actually works versus how we experience it.

The companies making workforce decisions right now didn’t wake up this quarter thinking, “Let’s invest in AI.” They made those investments 18 months ago. We’re living in the future those investments created. We just didn’t pause long enough to see it coming.

The compression of now

There’s another pattern in the mix too: the time between decision and impact keeps compressing.

It used to take weeks or months to go from idea to prototype to decision to implementation. Now? The person closest to the work can often build the thing faster than leadership can schedule a meeting about whether to build it.

That presses on how organizations function. When execution happens faster than permission can be granted, hierarchies become friction rather than structure. The pyramid model we’ve used for 150 years suddenly feels like trying to run modern software on a computer from 1995.

That compression didn’t spontaneously happen today. It’s been accumulating for years. We’re just now reaching the threshold where it becomes impossible to ignore.

The practice of pausing

When I work with leaders on organizational transformation, the first thing I ask them to do is pause. Not to plan or strategize or solve. Just to pause and sense what’s actually happening underneath the surface urgency.

Most of them resist (me included). It feels counterintuitive when there are so many urgent things demanding attention. But Taleb’s noise-to-signal ratio explains why the counterintuitive pause works: when you’re operating on an hourly or daily frequency, you’re making decisions based on 95-99% noise. You’re reacting to fluctuations that don’t matter and missing the trends that do.

Pausing creates space to shift your observation frequency. To move from hourly to monthly to yearly. To let the noise settle and see what persists.

I’m not talking about meditation or mindfulness, though those can help. I’m suggesting that you might want to unplug on a regular basis. You can’t see what’s coming if you’re constantly reacting to what’s happening.

A friend told me about a two-day quiet retreat he had this month. No agenda, no strategic planning, just space to think. He described having breakthrough after breakthrough. He wasn’t trying to solve today problems. He finally had enough distance from the daily noise to see the patterns underneath it.

That’s what pausing does. It reveals that today didn’t emerge from yesterday. Today emerged from decisions and investments made months and years ago. And your decisions today aren’t creating tomorrow—they’re creating next quarter, next year, the year after that.

Living in lag time

We live in the gap between cause and effect. Between investment and outcome. Between decision and impact.

That gap used to be longer—long enough that you could make a decision, see the results, adjust course. Now the compression of time means decisions compound faster. The lag still exists, but it’s measured in months instead of years.

This creates a strange temporal experience: you’re simultaneously living in the present, experiencing the outcomes of the past, and creating a future you won’t see until much later.

Most leaders operate as if they’re responding to the present. They’re actually responding to the past while creating a future they can’t yet see.

Exceptional leaders learn to operate in multiple time horizons simultaneously. They handle today’s urgencies while sensing what’s accumulating underneath. They make decisions knowing those decisions are investments in a future distant enough that it’s still mostly invisible.

This requires something specific: the ability to pause long enough to distinguish noise from signal. To see what’s actually changing versus what’s just fluctuating.

What we think and how we live

Fifteen years ago, if you’d told me I’d regularly get in cars with strangers and stay in strangers’ homes, I’d have thought you were asking me to do something dangerous. Now I don’t think twice about calling an Uber.

Our perceptions shift faster than we realize when we’re building the new thing rather than reacting to the old thing falling apart. We’re resilient, creative creatures. We went from 1% cars and 99% horses to the inverse in a single decade. We figured out how to stay home for two years during a pandemic.

We’ve done this before. We’ll do it again.

But one thing determines whether that transformation feels like catastrophe or opportunity: pausing long enough to see it coming and position yourself accordingly.

You don’t have to predict the future. You just need to know whether you’re responding to noise or signal. Whether you’re reacting to hourly fluctuations or sensing real trends. Whether you’re living in today’s urgency or investing in a future you can barely see yet.

Until you pause, you don’t really know what time it is.