Years ago, when I led a political fellowship, one of the first exercises we gave Fellows was simple: move your watch to your other wrist. Keep it there for two weeks.

Every time you glanced at the wrong wrist first (and you would, constantly), that little jolt of interruption was the whole point. A tiny crack in the cycle of automatic pattern recognition. A reminder that we move through the world mostly noticing what confirms what we already believe, quietly filtering out whatever creates friction.

That exercise was about priming the Fellows to question how "things just are."

The work we're most focused on at Ei right now does something similar, but at a much more profound scale. We’re working with teams and leaders to learn intentional practices for naming and unpacking their assumptions, creating space for new ways of thinking and doing. Because what’s key in a discontinuous environment isn't simply to find better answers faster, but to get honest about which questions are no longer the right ones to ask.

The problem with smart, capable people

You’ve heard me write this a few times now: the leaders who are most at risk right now aren't the unprepared ones. They're the experienced ones. Now, if this is you, I promise this is not an indictment of experience, but rather an invitation to pay closer attention to the presumptions you’re bringing to future-facing decisions.

Experience is more than a set of skills; it's also a set of assumptions about how the world works. Leaders get to the top by being right, repeatedly. That builds real competence. It also builds mental models that stop feeling like hypotheses and start feeling like facts.

When the environment breaks — not shifts, but fundamentally breaks — those models don't update automatically. Sometimes they can't. The instinct is to apply what worked before, push harder, stay the course. And that instinct is right almost every time, until it isn't.

What makes discontinuity so disorienting is that early failure looks exactly like early friction. And experienced leaders have navigated a lot of friction. So sometimes the instinct is to keep pushing through the friction, when what it’s really telling you is that something here has changed, and you need to stop and pay attention. Perhaps even completely alter your way forward.

This is where I want to turn the corner, because we've spent a lot of time in the last few Wednesday Words naming the problem. The question worth sitting with now is: what does it actually look like to build toward a reality in which people can thrive in this environment?

What actually helps: Collective Intelligence

This morning Ryan and I spent an hour with leaders from across sectors putting collective intelligence into practice. In just fifteen minutes, they were able to surface assumptions about specific business challenges and then begin to flip them. Most admitted they rarely stop to do that. But when we pause to examine what we’re bringing with us before trying to go into “solve” mode, we make room for ah-has and novel solutions we wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Collective intelligence isn't better collaboration. Collaboration is additive: you bring the right people into the room, everyone covers their lane, and the output is roughly the sum of what they knew when they walked in. That's useful. It's also not enough.

Collective intelligence is generative. It's what happens when people with genuinely different mental models, different assumptions about how the world works, are in productive friction with each other. The interaction produces something none of them could have produced alone. You're not pooling knowledge. You're creating something new from the collision between perspectives.

That's the capability that discontinuity actually requires. And it starts with the same purpose as the watch exercise. Not: What's the answer? But: What are we no longer seeing clearly?

As always, Happy Wednesday,

Sara