And then, silence. Not quiet, because in quiet, you still hear things; the wind, birds chirping, the highway miles away. You hear things in the quiet. The quiet makes you hyper-focused on sounds. In silence, there are no sounds. Nothing.

“Silence was deafening” is a phrase I’ve heard before, and it’s one that my years in the theater have taught me to recognize. There is nothing like a deafening silence, especially when you’re doing comedy. That’s what makes creating a comedy so difficult.

I recall a time when I was doing the play “Is He Dead?” and the other actors and I were trying to work out a bit. Now, a bit, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a self-contained unit of material centered on a single funny premise, theme, or story. It typically includes a setup, multiple punchlines, and related “tags” (additional quick punchlines), functioning as a building block for a longer routine. The bit we were working on involved an empty casket that supposedly contained a dear friend, but was actually just part of a trick we were playing on another character. Now, when you start a bit, you start with nothing. Perhaps you know the props you’re working with, but really, all you have is a piece of dialogue and the feeling that something has to happen here. So there we were, five actors, a casket, and nothing else. We came up with ideas, and those ideas evolved over rehearsal. By the time we got to final dress, we were tired, and we hated every single thing we did. Lucky for us, we had a very smart director, Chuck Morey, who didn’t let us get despondent. The problem? We had been playing this bit to empty rooms and people who had seen it over and over. Because of that, it was easy to lose confidence in the work we’d done and turn to changing everything. Again, a wise director kept us in check.

We knew in our hearts the bit was funny. It was mathematical, and we were all good comedic actors, so we understood the need for precision, energy, and playing the bit moment to moment. We knew it intellectually, but a good bit isn’t intellectual; it’s physical. The action is physical, and the response, when done right, is as well. The audience gets hit with the bit. The bit lands on them. And if it lands right, the response is laughter. A special kind of laughter where the audience is taken by surprise, and their laughter floods out of them in great waves that we, the actors, feel almost physically hitting us. There are very few feelings as good as doing a bit well and having the audience just explode. It is wonderful, and yet, it is terrifying. Wonderful because there is nothing that heals like laughter. During that particular show, no matter how I was feeling before curtain, when I stepped on stage with that cast, the joy of performing was ignited, and we all cruised through the show. Wonderful.

Terrifying? Yes. Imagine working hard in a rehearsal hall, constructing a great bit, working and sweating to hit the precision, the timing, and physical needs all down to math, everyone doing their part to the very best of their abilities, and then, you put it in front of an audience and … silence. That deafening silence we mentioned at the top of this piece. That happens. And there is nothing so gut-wrenching as getting it wrong. Being off by a fraction and the laugh just slipping by, out the window, and you’re left on stage with four minutes of bit left to do, and you can already feel the audience has checked out. There is not much to be done. You stay the course, do the work you rehearsed, and hope it’s just a sleepy audience who just had a big dinner and a bottle of wine and they’re just not with you this time. Okay, that’s one night, but if it happens again, then you have to drag the bit back into the room and rework it. Find what went wrong, why the laughs weren’t coming, and how to make it work. That’s what previews are for: to rework and fix what the audience told us wasn’t working. Okay, it’s a drag and a bummer and a bit deflating, but you need the show to be as good as possible, so back into the room to rebuild. That’s just part of the job, and we’ve all experienced it. Usually, you come up with something that works, and when you drop it on the audience and they laugh, the relief is indescribable. After the audience laughs, you can set and settle into the bit, add things, remove things, and hear the audience catch something; that becomes part of the bit for the run. It all works out, but it’s not as easy as it seems.

I was thinking about this today as I got an email with a photo from that show, and I recalled the work we put in to make not just the show, but that bit in particular, work. Thankfully, it landed perfectly, and we didn’t have to go back into the rehearsal room and make it work. We were able to do this because we had faith in what we were doing and because we had a solid comedic director who didn’t allow us to doubt ourselves and who trusted the work we had done. Still, there is that moment before there is an audience when you wonder, is any of this funny? Will any of this work? Are we all going to be standing onstage with omelet stations on our faces? In situations like that one, you have to have trust. Trust in the work you’ve done, in the serving of the play, and in the director who won’t allow you to doubt and question every single step of the way. But, most of all, you trust history. We’d all been there before, creating a bit out of nowhere, trusting that we knew what we were doing and allowing the bit to have its breadth. Trust your history, commit to the bit, and then you have to allow the risk of putting it out there to be worth it; you have to trust the past and not throw away everything because the empty room is no longer laughing.

“We just want a website,” I recall a client saying in a meeting. He was responding to the amount of depth ThoughtLab puts into a website before we even start on design. They had heard of us and knew we were top of the field in web design, but they didn’t want all the “bells and whistles,” as they called all the time and research that goes into creating a website that converts. They wanted it quick and cheap. At one point, someone on their team said, “You know, with AI we can knock this out in less than a day.” At which point we said, yes, yes, you can. And that client went on its way. Later, we looked at the website AI had knocked out in a day, and you know what, it looked good. It did. It looked like a website. But it didn’t do anything. I mean, aside from lacking animation or good storytelling, the site didn’t do anything. It didn’t solve the problems people might be coming to the site to get answers about. It certainly didn’t hold our attention, and it did nothing to convert. It looked like a website, as almost every single website looks when it’s slapped together. It looks fine, but looks are only a sliver of the overall spectrum when we’re talking about websites.

It isn’t really about websites. It’s about anything you’re building before you know if it’ll work: a campaign, a launch, a pitch, a first draft of a new offer. There’s always a version of it you could get fast, and it will look like the thing you meant to make. The question is never whether the fast version looks fine. It’s whether you’ll know what to do the moment it goes quiet.

I think about that client sometimes, and I think about that silent room.

When a bit died in previews, it was never a mystery for long. We knew our blocking, we knew our timing, we’d sweated over every beat of it, so when it didn’t land, we had somewhere to look. That’s also how we knew the difference between a bad night and a real problem: one quiet room might just be a quiet room, but we’d know our own choices well enough to see it if the same beat kept dying twice. That’s when we went back into the room, took the bit apart, found the half-second we were late on the turn, and rebuilt it. That’s not failure. That’s the job. The room exists so you have somewhere to go once you actually know something’s wrong.

The AI website never had a room. It had a prompt. It looked like a website the way a stand-in looks like an actor until you ask it to do something under pressure, and when it didn’t convert, there was nothing to rework, because nothing had been decided on purpose in the first place. You can’t drag a website back into rehearsal if it was never in rehearsal. You can only start over, and starting over from a prompt gets you exactly what you got the first time.

That’s what “trust the process” actually means, and it’s not a slogan. It means doing the work by hand long enough that you’d recognize your own choices if they failed, so that when the room goes quiet, you have something to go back to. A shortcut doesn’t just risk a worse result. It risks a result you couldn’t explain if someone asked you why it didn’t work. And in this business, someone always asks.

We still stepped on that stage every night, not knowing for certain the bit would land. That never goes away, and it shouldn’t. The day you’re certain is the day you’ve stopped listening to the room. But we walked out there with history behind us: reps, choices, a director who wouldn’t let us panic and rebuild from scratch just because one house was cold. That history is the only thing that makes the risk worth taking.

You can commission a website in a day. You can’t commission that.

Takeaway

The worry never fully goes away, and it isn’t supposed to. Every time you build something new, a campaign, a launch, a pitch, a first draft,  there’s a version of that silent house waiting for you, the one where you don’t know yet if it’ll land. That’s not a sign that something’s wrong. That’s just the room before the audience gets there.

What decides how that moment goes isn’t whether you’re nervous. It’s whether you know the thing you built well enough to fix it if it doesn’t land, or whether all you have is a result you can’t explain. One of those gives you somewhere to go. The other leaves you standing on stage with four minutes left and nothing but hope.

Trust the process. But build one worth trusting.

Ted Kazanoff was a great man, a brilliant acting teacher, and one of the most frustrating teachers I ever had the sheer pleasure of working with. That was the general consensus about Ted while I was in grad school at Brandeis University. One of the greatest things about Ted wasn’t something I discovered until years later, after I left school and embarked on my professional career as an actor. Ted never gave you answers; he asked you questions and pointed you in the right direction. That was his gift.

I mean, that wasn’t all. He had insights and theories about acting that I’ve carried with me ever since and passed on to anyone who happens to land in one of my classes. I’ve held onto those ideas because they work. For me, they work, and they seem to work for those I’ve shared them with. But when I was sitting in a classroom with Ted, trying to understand what he was saying while he dismantled a scene I’d just performed, I had no idea what he was talking about. And that, dear reader, was the point.

For an actor, answers are not like those for a math student. A mathematical constant is a fixed, unchanging number that arises naturally from the fundamental rules of geometry, calculus, or number theory. Because these values represent universal truths, they remain exactly the same across every equation and operation. They are constants. There are no constants in the art of acting.

One theory or approach may work brilliantly in one situation and fail completely in another. If you’re a method actor, you’re going to find it difficult to apply that same approach to classical work. It’s hard to method act Shakespeare. Different writers demand different ways in. I like animal imagery when I’m building a Shakespeare character. When I play Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, I often begin with the image of a bear. The physical informs the verbal, and the verbal melds with the physical, giving me an entrance into the character. Working from the outside in suits Shakespeare, at least for me. So if we agree there are very few constants in acting, we can also agree there are very few answers.

When I was studying with Ted, all I wanted were answers. How do I get better? What does better feel like? How do I get the part? How do I become famous? How do I get it?

Of course, Ted never answered those questions because his answers and my eventual discoveries were never going to be the same. The need for answers was outweighed by the value of process. As an actor, sometimes how we arrive at truth in imaginary circumstances is just as important as the destination itself.

Between my first and second years of grad school, I was doing a show when something Ted had said months earlier suddenly made sense. The fog I’d been dragging around like a piece of carry-on luggage was no longer a burden. It had become part of my process. It stopped being something I carried and became something I understood. Best of all, I arrived there on my own. Ted didn’t explain it, mostly because he wouldn’t. I simply found myself in the right place, in the right frame of mind, and everything clicked. It happened months after class, while I was standing on a professional stage.

As that realization became clearer with each rehearsal, I understood something that has stayed with me ever since. Had Ted simply given me the answer, I never would have been able to fully apply it to my own work. It wouldn’t have settled into me. It wouldn’t have lasted. The nuances behind his teaching had to be discovered individually, or they wouldn’t become yours.

Time, self-interpretation, and nuance all came together to help me understand what Ted had been trying to teach me. He planted the idea, pointed me toward it, then pushed me out the door and said, in effect, “Figure it out for yourself.” Only then did what I learned truly become mine.

Learning to Participate

Looking back now, I realize Ted wasn’t withholding answers because he enjoyed watching us struggle. Well…he did, a little. He’d laugh when one of us exploded in frustration, grin, and say, “Okay…start from there.”

But beneath the mischief was something much more important. Ted understood that struggle isn’t the obstacle to learning. It’s part of learning. Confusion isn’t necessarily a sign you’re failing. More often than not, it’s a sign you’re thinking.

We’ve spent so much of our lives trying to eliminate friction that we’ve forgotten some kinds of friction are productive. The discomfort of not quite understanding something forces us to stay with it. It asks us to turn an idea over, look at it from different angles, wrestle with it until it finally becomes our own. The moment someone simply hands us the answer, that process ends.

Increasingly, though, we seem less willing to tolerate that kind of uncertainty. We expect information to arrive fully formed, immediately understandable, and instantly useful. We want the key takeaways before we’ve considered the argument. We reach for the summary before we’ve read the story. We demand clarity before we’ve earned understanding.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve begun treating every unanswered question as a problem to solve instead of an invitation to think.

I found myself thinking about Ted again this morning after reading an article in The Atlantic about how we’re collectively reading less than we used to. Not because we’ve suddenly decided we don’t like books, but because we’ve slowly retrained ourselves to consume information differently. It struck me that reading isn’t all that different from what Ted was trying to teach us.

When you read, just like when you see a play or a film, you’re part of the experience. You can sit back and let it happen to you, or you can lean forward, ask questions, imagine, interpret, and participate in what’s unfolding. Artists don’t create so their work can remain hidden away. The completion of an artist’s endeavor is the audience.

I can rehearse a play, especially a comedy, for only so long before I need an audience to tell me whether it works. The audience isn’t just there to witness the performance; it’s the final element that completes it.

So I read the article about our declining reading habits, and it offered familiar explanations. TikTok and social media reward information delivered in small, visual bites that ask almost nothing of us beyond a like, a share, or the next swipe. They reward speed over contemplation. Reading asks something entirely different.

It asks us to hold characters, ideas, and unresolved questions in our minds. It encourages us to remember what happened fifty pages ago because it may matter fifty pages from now. It gives us leave to tolerate uncertainty, to wait for understanding, and occasionally to finish a chapter with more questions than answers. Most importantly, it asks us to participate.

The Reader’s Role

Increasingly, though, we’ve become accustomed to information that arrives already interpreted for us. We want the summary before we’ve read the article, the highlights before we’ve watched the interview, and the answer before we’ve had time to wrestle with the question.

Convenience isn’t the enemy here. But every time we remove a little more effort from the process, we also remove a little of the thinking that effort was quietly doing on our behalf.

One of the arguments the article put forward was that AI is making the problem worse. By summarizing, simplifying, and condensing information so effortlessly, it risks stripping away the nuance that makes ideas worth exploring in the first place. I don’t think that’s quite right.

AI is capable of remarkable nuance when we ask it to be. It can compare competing ideas, examine multiple perspectives, challenge assumptions, and spend thousands of words exploring an argument from every conceivable angle. But that’s rarely what we ask of it.

We ask for summaries. Bullet points. Executive briefs. Key takeaways. We ask it to tell us what matters before we’ve taken the time to decide that for ourselves.

In many ways, we’re approaching AI exactly as we’ve trained ourselves to approach everything else: as a shortcut to certainty.

Certainty on Demand

The irony, of course, is that AI doesn’t force us to stop thinking any more than a calculator forces us to stop understanding mathematics. We decide how we use the tools we create. We can ask AI to challenge us, question us, expose us to ideas we hadn’t considered, or argue the opposite side of a position we’re convinced is right. Or we can ask it to save us time. Increasingly, we’ve chosen the latter. That’s not a failure of artificial intelligence. It’s a reflection of our own priorities.

AI hasn’t removed nuance from our thinking. It has simply become extraordinarily good at reflecting the way we’ve chosen to consume information. It didn’t teach us to want shorter answers or quicker conclusions. We taught ourselves that over years of headlines, notifications, executive summaries, social media feeds, and endless scrolling. AI simply arrived at a moment when we’d already decided faster was better and certainty was preferable to curiosity.

I think about Ted often these days, usually when someone asks me for an answer I know I shouldn’t give. It’s tempting. Answers are satisfying. They make us feel helpful. They bring conversations to a neat conclusion. But Ted understood that the answers we remember most are rarely the ones we’re handed. They’re the ones we discover after wrestling with an idea long enough for it to become our own.

The Search Matters

Perhaps that’s what concerns me most about the way we consume information today. It’s not that we have access to AI, social media, or instant answers. Those are extraordinary tools, and used thoughtfully, they can help us learn, create, and explore ideas in ways that were unimaginable only a few years ago.

My concern is that we’re becoming less willing to participate in the process of understanding. We want the conclusion without the journey. The insight without the struggle. The certainty without the curiosity.

Ted never let us have that luxury. He trusted that confusion had value. He believed questions could teach more than answers, that nuance wasn’t something to be explained but something to be discovered. Looking back, I realize he wasn’t just teaching us how to act. He was teaching us how to think.

Maybe that’s the question we should be asking ourselves as AI becomes more capable. Not whether it can think like we do, but whether we’ll continue to value the kind of thinking that asks us to slow down, sit with uncertainty, wrestle with ideas, and participate in the search for meaning instead of simply accepting the first answer we receive.

Maybe the real danger isn’t that AI becomes better at answering questions. Maybe it’s that we’re becoming less willing to live with them.

Ted pointed me in the right direction, opened the door, and sent me on my way. It took me months to understand what he was trying to teach me, but because I found it myself, I’ve carried that lesson with me for the rest of my life.

I sometimes wonder how many of the most important ideas in our lives are like that, ideas that can’t be summarized, accelerated, or handed to us because they only become meaningful through the act of discovering them ourselves. Maybe that’s why books still matter. Maybe that’s why great teachers ask questions instead of giving answers. And maybe that’s why, every now and then, it’s worth closing the summary, opening the book, and allowing ourselves the time to search.

Some answers are worth waiting for.

I found myself alone at the stern of a smallish whale-watching boat off the coast of Juneau. The captain had cut the engines and pointed to a patch of water where some “action” had been reported, and the rest of the passengers poured out of the cabin and crowded onto the bow. It was shoulder to shoulder up there, cameras and phones already raised, everyone trying to get a decent position at the rail. I took one look at the crowd and decided I didn’t feel like fighting for a place to stand, so I wandered to the stern, where a sea lion was swimming alongside the boat, minding its own business and doing sea lion stuff.

I was watching where the sea lion was, and now was not, when everything went quiet. Then, directly in front of me, not more than an arm’s length away, three humpback whales came to the surface. One followed the other in quick succession. They took a deep breath, hung at the surface for a moment, unafraid of the boats full of gawkers around them, and then slowly, oh so gracefully, they returned to the depths. Their enormous tails, each marked with distinctive patterns, were the last things I saw before these gentle giants slipped beneath the surface to continue feeding and living their giant lives.

I didn’t raise my camera or my phone in those moments. It wasn’t some noble decision on my part. I wasn’t making a stand against technology or choosing to be present in some wonderfully enlightened way. I simply forgot I had a phone. I didn’t need to prove to anyone that it happened, and I knew, even as it was happening, that this was one of those memories I’d never need a photograph to recall. It was intimate, moving, and awe-inspiring. After the whales had gone below, the captain was standing behind me, and he said, “Good for you, that was pretty damn amazing.”

A few moments later, the whales resurfaced several yards ahead of the boat, and the bow lookers were rewarded with tails and spouts and the photographs they’d been waiting for. I was still at the stern, trying to come to grips with the size and gentleness of these amazing creatures. It’s one thing to watch hundreds of nature documentaries and shows about the ocean and whales. It’s something else entirely to stand on a boat and have three of them surround you only a few feet away. No matter how many whales you see on screens and photos, even giant screens designed to make you feel as if you’re there, there’s absolutely nothing like being that close, hearing the sound as they take a breath, seeing their gigantic tails slip so effortlessly beneath the surface. You’re left stunned and humble.

After about half an hour, the captain called for us to get back into the cabin as he put the boat in gear and headed for another spot. When we reached it, we moved back outside, this time spreading out fore and aft, and there, about a hundred yards from the boat, we saw three huge black dorsal fins cutting through the water. We were looking at a pod of orcas, also known as killer whales, though that name suddenly felt a little dramatic once you were watching them just go about their day.

This pod, like the humpbacks we’d watched earlier, had a baby among them. When the adults surfaced to breathe, the baby popped up too, bouncing and splashing like a toddler. The adults were focused on feeding. The baby just wanted to play. And play he did, flipping over adults, jumping out of the water, and landing awkwardly on his side. One of the women on the boat said, “The baby is just like my Justin when he was a kid, always doing gymnastics in the house, bouncing off walls.” And he was. Except this little kid already weighed a ton.

The two naturalists on board, both in their late twenties, kept telling us this was the best whale watch they’d ever been on. In fact, they said they rarely saw orcas on a trip out. But there they were. One male’s dorsal fin seemed impossibly tall, straight and strong, unlike the collapsed and folded dorsal fins I’d seen on orcas in captivity at SeaWorld. We watched them move slowly along, unimpressed with the boats around them and the people hanging off those boats, all of us trying to get the best view of animals that didn’t seem to care whether we were there or not.

Between the three humpbacks that surrounded me at the stern and the pod of orcas moving so close to us, I felt tiny. But I also felt safe. The humpbacks had looked at me, or at least it felt that way. They saw I was just this puny human guy on a small, easily smashable boat, floating around in their territory, and they judged me okay. Not a threat. Maybe they had chartered a human watch the same way we had chartered a whale watch. Maybe some older female had told the others, in whatever language whales use, “Hey, I know a spot where humans congregate. Let’s go look at some. They’re hilariously small and weak.”

So there was a moment when the three giants surrounded me, and I had no idea whether I was the one watching or the one being watched.

Giants

I’ve watched nature documentaries for as long as I can remember. Like most people, I’ve seen whales on screens hundreds of times. I’ve watched them breach in slow motion, seen drone footage that shows their sheer size against the vastness of the ocean, and sat in front of giant cinema screens that promise to immerse you in the experience. They’re all remarkable, but they’re all missing something.

Scale is one of those things that’s almost impossible to appreciate until you’re standing beside it. You can know how big a humpback is. You can read the statistics, admire the photography, and marvel at the aerial footage, but none of it prepares you for hearing one take a breath just a few feet away, or watching something the size of a house move through the water with a grace that seems to defy its own mass. It’s one of those experiences that instantly remind you there’s a world beyond the one we spend most of our lives looking at through glass.

What surprised me most wasn’t the size of the whales, it was how they made me feel. Standing next to something so enormous, I didn’t feel vulnerable or threatened. I felt small, and strangely, I found that comforting.

We spend much of our lives trying to feel bigger than we are. We build careers, companies, and reputations. We compete, compare, and convince ourselves that being important is the same thing as being significant. Then, every once in a while, nature quietly reminds us that we’re none of those things. We’re just another species sharing a planet with creatures so much larger than us that they make all our usual measures of scale feel a little ridiculous.

Maybe that’s why the encounter stayed with me. For a few brief moments, my world shrank to the sound of whales breathing and the sight of giant tails disappearing beneath the surface. My emails, deadlines, worries, and ambitions all seemed to become wonderfully unimportant. I wasn’t thinking about work, the news, or what was waiting for me when I got home. I was simply standing on the back of a boat, watching three giants go about their day, completely indifferent to the fact that I was there.

It wasn’t until much later that I started thinking about the word giant. We use it all the time. We talk about technology giants, retail giants, financial giants, and industry giants as though the word has become little more than shorthand for success. Standing beside an actual giant has a funny way of reminding you that we’ve rather lost sight of what the word was supposed to mean.

The Biggest Things on Earth

It struck me later that we borrow the word giant remarkably freely. We talk about technology giants, retail giants, pharmaceutical giants, financial giants, and industrial giants as though size alone is enough to earn the title. Sometimes we even describe people that way. Sporting giants. Literary giants. Giants of industry. Standing beside an actual giant makes you realize how casually we’ve been using the word.

Real giants don’t spend much time trying to convince you they’re giants. The humpbacks didn’t announce themselves. They didn’t breach because there was an audience. They didn’t swim a little closer so we’d get a better photograph. They weren’t performing for us any more than the sea lion had been. We just happened to be sharing a small patch of ocean for a few minutes before they got on with the business of being whales.

The same was true of the orcas. There were half a dozen boats following them, people hanging over the rails hoping for the perfect shot, yet the whales couldn’t have cared less. They surfaced when they needed to breathe, disappeared when they needed to feed, and carried on with lives that had absolutely nothing to do with us. There’s something oddly refreshing about that.

We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives trying to be noticed. People do it. Brands do it. Companies certainly do it. We celebrate visibility as though it were the same as importance.

The whales couldn’t have cared less. They surfaced because they needed air, not because they had an audience. They disappeared beneath the surface without the slightest concern for whether anyone had managed to capture the perfect photograph.

Attention has become one of the world’s most valuable currencies, and just about everyone is trying to capture ours. The whales weren’t interested in any of it. They didn’t need our admiration or validation. They didn’t need an audience to confirm their importance. They simply existed, completely indifferent to whether we noticed them or not. It made me wonder if we’ve started confusing visibility with significance.

The biggest things on Earth don’t spend their lives trying to be seen. They simply are. Maybe that’s why standing next to them feels so humbling. For a few moments, all the things we normally use to measure success quietly disappear. Followers, market share, job titles, awards, and quarterly results don’t mean very much when you’re standing beside something that has been navigating the oceans for millions of years.

Perhaps that’s the lesson the whales left me with. Greatness doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it swims quietly beneath the surface, completely unconcerned about whether anyone is watching.

The View from the Stern

I’ve thought about that morning more times than I can count, and one detail keeps coming back to me.

I wasn’t standing at the stern because I was looking for a better view, I was there because the bow was crowded and I’d wandered off to watch a sea lion. There was no strategy, no insight, no grand plan. I simply ended up somewhere nobody else happened to be. It makes me wonder how often that happens in business.

Most of us spend our time looking where everyone else is looking. We read the same reports, chase the same trends, attend the same conferences, and convince ourselves that if everyone is moving in one direction, that’s probably where the opportunity lies. Sometimes that’s true. But sometimes the most memorable experiences, the biggest ideas, and the most unexpected discoveries happen because we looked somewhere else.

I’m not suggesting we ignore the crowd for the sake of being different. There’s nothing particularly clever about standing at the back of a boat while everyone else rushes to the front. In my case, it was little more than chance. But chance has a habit of rewarding curiosity. If I hadn’t wandered off to watch that sea lion, I wouldn’t have found myself standing within a few feet of three humpback whales. I’d have gone home with the same photographs as everyone else, but without the memory that has stayed with me ever since.

I never did take a photograph that morning. My phone stayed in my pocket, not because I was making a point, but because for a few brief moments I’d forgotten it existed. Looking back, I’m glad I did.

If I’d taken a picture, I’d probably have looked at it a few times before it disappeared into the thousands of photographs sitting on my phone. Instead, I remember the sound of a humpback taking a breath just a few feet away. I remember the spray catching my face. I remember the baby orca bouncing around its family like an overexcited child. I remember feeling tiny, and somehow completely safe. Those are the things that stayed with me.

Perhaps that’s because the moments that shape us aren’t always the ones we capture. They’re the ones we experience so completely that we don’t think to reach for a camera in the first place.

Standing at the wrong end of the boat turned out to be the right place to be. Not because it gave me a better view, but because it reminded me that significance isn’t always where the crowd is looking. Sometimes it’s quietly waiting somewhere else, completely unconcerned about whether anyone notices.

Looking back, it wasn’t really the whales that changed the course of that morning. It was the sea lion. If I hadn’t looked at the crowd on the bow and decided it was too busy, if I hadn’t wandered to the stern to watch something that had simply caught my eye, I’d have gone home with the same photographs as everyone else and missed the moment I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

Curiosity rarely announces where it’s going to lead. More often than not, it starts with something small, something that seems hardly worth noticing. A sea lion swimming past the back of a boat. A conversation. A question. An idea that doesn’t quite fit with what everyone else is thinking.

Most of us spend our lives following well-worn paths because they’re comfortable and they’re proven. Every now and then, though, curiosity nudges us in a different direction, and that’s where the interesting things tend to happen.

The Takeaway

Curiosity rarely points us toward the biggest opportunities. More often, it draws us toward something small, unexpected, or seemingly unimportant. A question. A conversation. A different point of view. Or even a sea lion swimming past the back of a boat.

The organizations that continue to innovate aren’t always the ones chasing what everyone else is chasing. More often, they’re the ones willing to follow their curiosity, explore beyond the obvious, and remain open to finding something remarkable where nobody thought to look.

I have nine minutes before a meeting. I’m prepared, ready, willing, and perhaps, depending on how you define it, able. I have coffee, notes, a list of things I’ve accomplished during the week, and I’m ready. Problem is, I have nine minutes and nothing to fill that time with. AI has helped me save time in my work, but now I have this extra time, which isn’t enough to make breakfast or drive over to FogTown coffee for a cuppa joe and a breakfast sammich with sriracha mayo, good sausage, and the kind of morning that makes you briefly reconsider your entire routine.  I don’t have time to watch a movie or a YouTube video, as my time is now down to six minutes.

There will be plenty of time post-meeting to do work, and there is work to be done; it’s just the interim period, four minutes with nothing to do because there’s not enough time to start anything. AI has helped me save so much time that I now have a brief moment in time where I have a surplus of time but not enough time to do anything meaningful, so I guess I didn’t save enough time this time. Two minutes.

Meeting.

But I’m still wondering about time-saving. What are we saving all this time for? Seriously, can I get a jar to sit on my desk that I can drop time into and pull out when I need it? Time to read, or pontificate on an otherworldly cheeseburger. I mean, everything we get sold promises to be a time saver. No more wasting time. Brands have built empires on the idea of time-saving. But are we saving time? And if so, how come most of us are putting that time directly back into working?

Brands swear that they will save you time, give you time, put time back in your pocket, like time is marbles or sand brains or coins. But are we really saving any time, and what are we doing with that time? Where does it go, and how do brands help us make better use of our time, not just promise to save us time when we all know time cannot be saved, nor can it be hoarded like acorns in a tree. Once you do something that is now taking up your time, does using a specific brand actually stop time so you can use that time for more appealing tasks? 

Does a brand telling us it will save time actually lie to us?

The Time Didn’t Go Anywhere. It’s Right There. Waiting.

Here’s the thing about saved time. It doesn’t disappear into some kind of cosmic savings account where it earns interest and pays out when you need an extra hour on a Tuesday. Time isn’t a 401k. You can’t defer it, roll it over, or cash it out when the market looks good. When a brand saves you time, that time goes exactly one place: somewhere else in your day, looking for trouble. Like a gang member from the Jets or the Sharks. They have time to rumble in toe shoes, with jazz hands. That’s time well spent.

Wouldn’t it be something if we had time purses? Little cosmic clip-top purses we all carried around, dropping our saved minutes in throughout the day. Then, when you’re running late, or sitting across from a friend over a sandwich, or just enjoying a quiet moment with your own reflection, you could reach in, pull out a dollop of time, and apply it directly to your circumstances. We don’t have that. We have a calendar app and the vague sense that we should be further along by now.

Think about what actually happens. AI writes your first draft in four minutes instead of forty. Congratulations. You now have thirty-six minutes. What do you do with thirty-six minutes? If you’re like most people, you use them to do more work, answer more emails, take a meeting you’d previously had a reasonable excuse to decline, or stare at your screen, wondering why you feel busy when you just saved 36 minutes. The time didn’t get saved. It got reassigned. There’s a difference, and brands have been remarkably quiet about it.

This isn’t new, by the way. The dishwasher was supposed to liberate households from the tyranny of hand washing dishes. And it did. It also quietly introduced the expectation that the kitchen would now be cleaner more often, dinner parties could be larger, and somehow the time saved by not scrubbing a pot was immediately absorbed by everything the dishwasher made newly possible. Same with the washing machine, the microwave, the calendar app, and the project management software that was going to make everything more efficient, but instead gave everyone a new place to have meetings about meetings.

Brands don’t save time. They relocate it. And they’ve been getting away with this for decades because we’re very busy people who don’t have time to notice.

Saving Time Since, Actually, Never 

Brands have been selling time like they own it. Save time. Reclaim your day. Get back to what matters. It’s the oldest pitch in the book, and it works because we want it to be true so badly that we’ll pay almost anything to believe it for another quarter. There’s an entire economy built on the promise of time returned, and if you look closely at the fine print, which nobody does because who has time, you’ll notice the promise is always future tense. You will save time. Your mornings will be easier. You’ll finally have room to breathe.

They never say when.

Every generation gets its own version of the pitch. The microwave was going to save dinner. The laptop was going to save the office. The smartphone was apparently going to save everything, but instead it just moved the office into your pocket and followed you to the beach, the dinner table and the bathroom. AI is the current champion of the time-saving promise, and it’s genuinely impressive technology, but let’s be honest about what’s actually happening. We’re not saving time. We’re getting faster at filling it back up again. We’re efficiency machines running on a treadmill that keeps pace with however efficient we become.

The brands aren’t lying exactly. That’s what makes it so good. The time does move. Something does get faster. The pitch is technically defensible. It’s just that nobody mentions that the time you saved on that task is going directly into three new tasks that the saved time made possible. You didn’t get your afternoon back. You got a more ambitious to-do list.

And somehow, every time, we’re surprised. Like local news anchors who marvel when a new month starts, “Can you believe it’s June???” Yes, yes, I can because it happens every single freakin’ year.

Nobody Saved You Time. They Just Moved Your Furniture.

Here’s the question nobody in the time-saving business wants to answer: saved for what, exactly? Because if the answer is “to do more work,” we’ve built an entire industrial complex of efficiency tools that have successfully helped us become more productive at being busy. That’s not salvation. That’s a faster hamster wheel with better branding.

We don’t have a time-saving problem. We have a time-purpose problem. The time was always there. It didn’t need saving. What it needed was a reason, and nobody’s selling that because reasons are personal and personal doesn’t scale, and scaling is what built the empires we’re talking about.

Think about the last time you genuinely had time to yourself. Not time between things. Not time you were supposed to be doing something else. Actual time, with no agenda and no guilt attached. Can you remember it? Because most people can’t, and that’s not because they haven’t saved enough time. It’s because every tool designed to give them time back came with an implicit instruction manual that said, “Now do more.”

The furniture got moved around beautifully. The room looks different. But you’re still living in the same house, working the same hours, wondering why the kitchen always feels cluttered.

What Would You Do With a Free Tuesday?

Seriously. Think about it. Not a holiday Tuesday, when errands and obligations are dressed up as leisure. A real Tuesday. No meetings, no deliverables, no inbox quietly filling up like a bathtub with a slow leak. Just a Tuesday that belongs entirely to you. What would you do with it?

Most people, when asked this question, go blank. Not because they’re incapable of imagination, but because the question feels vaguely dangerous. Like admitting you’d like a free Tuesday is admitting you’re not committed enough, not hungry enough, not sufficiently devoted to the grind that everyone around you seems very publicly devoted to. We’ve spent so long optimizing our time that we’ve forgotten to have any opinions about what it’s actually for.

On the old Mickey Mouse Club, Tuesday was Anything Can Happen Day. Which, as a concept, is genuinely radical when you think about it. A whole day with no predetermined outcome. No agenda. No optimized workflow. Just Tuesday, wide open, ready for whatever showed up. We were fine with that once. We thought it sounded fun.

And here’s where it gets interesting. The brands selling you time savings have absolutely no interest in you having a free Tuesday. A free Tuesday is a problem for their business model. What they want is for you to save time on the thing they’re selling so you can spend that time on the next thing someone else is selling. The economy of time savings only works if the saved time is reinvested immediately. A person sitting quietly on a porch on a Tuesday afternoon, doing nothing in particular, eating a sandwich, maybe a good one with sriracha mayo and proper sausage, is not a growth market.

The time purse is a beautiful idea. The problem is nobody wants you to fill it. They want you to spend it before you even know you have it.

Busy Is a Choice. So Is the Sandwich. 

We’ve made busyness a personality. Not just a condition, a full identity with its own aesthetic, its own vocabulary, its own LinkedIn posts about grinding and hustle and sleeping when you’re dead. Busy means important. Busy means wanted. Busy means you matter in a way that a person sitting on a porch on a Tuesday afternoon apparently does not.

But here’s the thing about busyness. It’s the perfect hiding place. If you’re busy enough, you never have to answer the question of what you’d actually do with your time if you had it. You never have to find out whether you’d like the answer. The saved time never accumulates because you won’t let it. Every efficiency tool, every AI assistant, every app promising to give you your mornings back becomes a shovel you use to dig a bigger pile of things to do. Not because you have to. Because the alternative is a Tuesday with nothing in it, and that is apparently terrifying.

This isn’t a productivity problem. It’s an identity problem. We’ve confused the schedule with the self for so long that clearing the schedule feels like losing something. The brands know this, by the way. They’ve always known it. Busy people are the best customers. They’ll buy anything that promises relief without requiring them to actually stop.

So the next time a brand tells you it’s going to save you time, ask yourself what you’re planning to do with it. Not what you’ll probably do with it. What you actually want to do with it. There’s a difference, and that difference is where your actual life is hiding.

The Takeaway

At ThoughtLab, we spend a lot of time thinking about what brands promise versus what brands deliver. Not because we enjoy being difficult, although we do, but because the gap between those two things is usually where the most interesting work lives. And the time-saving promise is one of the oldest, most successful, most quietly dishonest gaps in the business.

Nobody is going to give you your time back. Not the app, not the AI, not the project management software with the friendly interface and the aggressive onboarding email sequence. What they can do, what the good ones actually do, is help you spend your time on things that matter instead of things that merely accumulate. That’s a different promise. It’s a harder promise to make and a harder one to keep, but it’s the one worth making.

Because here’s the question we’d leave you with. Not what tool is going to save you time, but what would you do if you actually had some? What’s the thing you keep not doing because you’re waiting for a window that never quite opens? What’s your Tuesday?

The time purse is yours. It’s always been yours. The question was never how to fill it. The question is whether you’re brave enough to spend it on something that doesn’t show up on a quarterly review.

FogTown opens at six. The sriracha mayo isn’t going to eat itself.

There’s a brand I’ve been watching for the past two years that has never once tried to explain itself to me.

No founder diary. No behind-the-scenes content. No manifesto pinned to the top of its social channels. It launches products, shares only what it needs to share, and then largely gets out of the way. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, people talk about the brand constantly. I notice it because it’s become unusual.

Most brands have spent the last decade moving in the opposite direction. They’ve embraced radical transparency, documented every stage of their process, and turned founders into full-time content creators. The assumption behind this approach is straightforward: the more people see of a brand, the more connected they’ll feel to it.

For a long time, that assumption made sense. Today, it deserves another look.

The Bargain Brands Made With the Internet

The internet offered brands a remarkably attractive deal. Show up consistently, publish constantly, and participate in every conversation. In return, you’ll earn reach, attention, and relevance. Visibility became the objective because visibility delivered results. And for a while, it worked exactly as promised.

In the early days of social media, simply being present online set a brand apart. A founder who shared their thinking openly felt authentic. A company that gave customers a glimpse behind the curtain felt refreshingly transparent. The practices we now take for granted were once genuine differentiators. But differentiation has a habit of becoming expectation.

As more brands adopted the same tactics, visibility stopped being distinctive. What once felt novel gradually became standard, and what became standard eventually faded into the background.

Today, consumers encounter a constant stream of content from companies competing for the same finite pool of attention. Brands explain their decisions, document their processes, react to cultural moments, and communicate at a frequency that would have seemed unimaginable fifteen years ago.

The problem isn’t that any of those activities is inherently wrong. The problem is that when everyone follows the same playbook, visibility alone no longer creates interest. Something else becomes valuable.

Specifically, the space between what consumers know about a brand and what they’d still like to know.

That’s where anticipation lives. It’s where curiosity begins. And it’s a space many brands have spent years eliminating without realizing its value.

Why Mystery Still Matters

Human beings are naturally drawn toward incomplete information. It’s why cliffhangers work, why people speculate about upcoming product launches, and why a novel becomes difficult to put down once an unanswered question takes hold. We enjoy discovering things for ourselves.

That instinct doesn’t disappear when people interact with brands. If anything, it becomes even more important in categories where products are easy to copy, and attention is increasingly difficult to earn.

A brand becomes interesting when it leaves room for exploration. Consumers don’t need every detail immediately. In many cases, they become more engaged when some of the story remains unresolved.

Consider anticipation. Its appeal comes almost entirely from uncertainty. Before a launch, people imagine possibilities. They discuss potential outcomes. They fill in the blanks themselves. The period before something arrives often generates more emotional energy than the arrival itself.

When every feature, decision, and product detail is revealed months in advance, that dynamic changes. Consumers aren’t discovering anything. They’re simply receiving information they’ve already been given.

Luxury brands understood this long before social media. They built desire through selective visibility rather than constant exposure. Their communications revealed enough to generate interest, but rarely so much that the audience felt there was nothing left to uncover. The lesson wasn’t that brands should be secretive. It was that intrigue has value. And intrigue requires restraint.

The Content Trap

Ironically, some of the brands that have lost the most intrigue are the ones that invested the most heavily in connection.

The pattern is easy to recognize. A company launches with a distinctive product, a fresh point of view, or a founder who sees the market differently. Early customers respond because the brand feels genuinely interesting. Growth follows. Then comes the understandable decision to accelerate that growth through content.

A strategy is built. A publishing cadence is established. The founder begins sharing more frequently. Product development becomes a series of updates. Internal conversations become public stories. Every decision becomes an opportunity to educate the audience.

None of this is inherently bad. In fact, many of these tactics work. They generate engagement, increase reach, and create the appearance of momentum.

What often goes unnoticed is the cumulative effect.

The more thoroughly a brand explains itself, the less opportunity consumers have to form their own relationship with it. The audience stops discovering and starts observing. They aren’t piecing together meaning for themselves because the brand has already done the work on their behalf.

Information is valuable. Transparency is valuable. But neither should be mistaken for fascination.

A brand can tell people everything and still leave them feeling very little.

That’s because curiosity depends on there being something left to uncover. Once every decision, belief, and process has been documented, the experience becomes complete. Consumers may know more about the brand than ever before, but knowing more doesn’t always translate into caring more.

In some cases, it has the opposite effect.

The challenge isn’t deciding whether to share. It’s deciding what not to share.

Restraint as a Competitive Position

The brands gaining cultural relevance today aren’t necessarily quieter than their competitors. They aren’t disappearing from public view or refusing to engage with their audiences.

What sets many of them apart is a more disciplined approach to visibility.

Consider Bottega Veneta. In 2021, the luxury fashion house deleted its social media accounts at a time when most brands were investing heavily in platform growth. The decision generated headlines because it appeared to challenge one of modern marketing’s most deeply held assumptions: that constant presence is required to remain relevant.

Yet the brand didn’t vanish from public consciousness. People continued encountering it through fashion coverage, cultural conversations, celebrity influence, and word of mouth. Its relationship with attention changed, but its ability to attract attention didn’t.

The takeaway isn’t that brands should abandon social media. Most shouldn’t.

What’s more interesting is the distinction between visibility and relevance. They’re related, but they’re not the same thing.

Many marketers treat attention as something that can only be earned through frequency. The assumption is that if a brand stops talking, people will stop listening.

That assumption becomes less convincing when every competitor is following the same strategy.

In a world where everyone is constantly explaining themselves, selective restraint can become a form of differentiation. When every brand participates in every conversation, the brand that speaks with greater intention often carries more weight.

This doesn’t require secrecy. It doesn’t require artificial scarcity. It simply requires a willingness to leave some things unsaid.

Consumers don’t need access to every decision, every discussion, or every piece of thinking that happens inside an organization. In many cases, sharing less creates more room for engagement because people are invited to interpret, explore, and draw conclusions on their own.

That’s a very different experience from being told exactly what to think.

The Paradox of Modern Marketing

The difficulty, of course, is that modern marketing systems aren’t designed to reward restraint.

Most teams are measured on activity. Content calendars need to be filled. Channels need to be maintained. Dashboards reward consistency, frequency, and engagement. When those are the metrics being tracked, producing less content can feel irresponsible.

From an operational perspective, the pressure is understandable.

The problem is that platforms and brands aren’t always optimizing for the same outcome.

Platforms benefit when attention remains inside the system. Brands are trying to build something more durable. They want recognition, preference, loyalty, and cultural relevance. Those goals often overlap, but they aren’t identical.

A piece of content can perform extremely well while contributing very little to the long-term strength of a brand. Conversely, a decision that strengthens a brand’s identity may not generate an immediate spike in engagement.

That’s what makes restraint so difficult.

Its value rarely appears in a dashboard. It shows up later, in the form of anticipation, interest, and a sense that the brand occupies a unique place in people’s minds.

Those qualities are harder to measure than impressions or clicks, but they’re often far more valuable.

Bringing It Back

None of this suggests that brands should stop communicating.

The challenge isn’t visibility itself. The challenge is the assumption that more visibility is always better.

The strongest brands understand that every communication decision affects not only what people know, but also what they still want to know. That second consideration is often overlooked.

A few principles are worth keeping in mind.

Build anticipation instead of constantly previewing what’s coming next. The excitement surrounding a launch often depends on leaving room for speculation.

Share selectively. Not every internal discussion, product decision, or strategic insight needs to become content. Audiences rarely miss information they never expected to receive.

Create opportunities for discovery. People tend to value things they feel they’ve found for themselves. The experience of uncovering something is often more powerful than having it explained.

Resist the urge to participate in every conversation. Brands that comment on everything rarely have much to say. A more selective voice tends to carry greater credibility.

Most importantly, leave room for interpretation. Consumers don’t need every aspect of a brand fully explained. In many cases, their own conclusions are more meaningful than any narrative the brand could provide.

The goal isn’t silence.

It’s discipline.

The Value of Being Partially Unknown

For much of the internet era, the central challenge facing brands was visibility. Media channels were fragmented, competition was increasing, and attention was becoming harder to earn. Under those conditions, being seen felt like the primary objective.

That logic made sense.

What it couldn’t anticipate was a world in which nearly every brand would become equally visible.

We’re now living in that world.

The question is no longer how to be seen. Most brands can achieve visibility if they’re willing to invest enough time, money, and effort into producing content.

The more important question is what happens after people see you.

Do they become interested?

Do they remember you?

Do they feel compelled to learn more?

The brands answering those questions most effectively aren’t relying on a radically new strategy. If anything, they’re returning to an older understanding of how attention works.

People are drawn not only to what they can see, but also to what remains just beyond view.

A brand doesn’t become compelling because it reveals everything. It becomes compelling because it gives people a reason to keep looking.

The Takeaway

For years, marketers operated under the assumption that greater visibility would naturally create stronger connections. In many cases, it did. But as every brand adopted the same approach, visibility became easier to achieve and less meaningful as a source of differentiation.

Today’s consumers are surrounded by content. They have unprecedented access to brands, founders, products, and processes. Yet access alone doesn’t create interest. In some cases, it can diminish it by eliminating the uncertainty that makes people curious in the first place.

The opportunity isn’t to disappear. It’s to become more deliberate about what gets shared and what doesn’t.

ThoughtLab’s research often points to the same conclusion: when capabilities become commonplace, differentiation becomes more valuable. In branding, that may mean resisting the assumption that every story needs to be told and every process needs to be documented. Sometimes the advantage comes from leaving room for discovery. 

The brands that stand out in an age of overexposure understand that curiosity, anticipation, and engagement all depend on there being something left to discover. They recognize that not every question needs an immediate answer and not every decision requires an explanation.

In a marketplace obsessed with saying more, restraint has become surprisingly powerful.

Not because consumers want less information.

Because they still want the experience of finding something worth knowing.

And in a culture organized around constant exposure, that may be one of the few advantages that can’t be easily copied. Not secrecy. Restraint.

There is a moment most people have had in the last year that no one talks about in strategy meetings. You’re trying to resolve something with a company. A canceled flight, a denied claim, a charge you don’t recognize. You open the chat window. The bot greets you by name and asks how it can help. You type. It misreads you. You rephrase. It misreads you again. You type the word agent and it offers you a help article. You type it again, and it asks if you’d like to start over. By the time a person finally appears, you’re not a customer anymore. You’re an opponent.

This’s the part that the dashboards don’t capture, because the dashboards were built to capture something else.

For most of the last decade, the dominant story about customer experience has been a story about friction. Friction was the enemy. Long hold times, repetitive forms, sluggish processes, and the indignity of being passed from one department to another. The promise of automation, and then AI, was that friction could be engineered out of the system. Faster resolution. Lower cost to serve. Better experience, in theory, for everyone. The story wasn’t wrong. It was just incomplete.

Because as the operational friction came down, something else came up in its place. Something the metrics weren’t designed to see. Customers started reporting that the experience felt worse even when it was, by every measurable definition, faster. The interaction was more efficient and somehow more humiliating. The system worked, and yet people walked away feeling worked over. The category had solved one problem and unintentionally created another, and the new one’s harder to fix because it doesn’t show up in the same dashboard. The new problem isn’t friction. It’s conflict.

Friction Was Operational. Conflict Is Emotional.

The traditional definition of friction is logistical. It’s the time, the steps, and the effort it takes to get something done. Friction in that sense is annoying but impersonal. You wait, you repeat yourself, you fill out the form again, and eventually the thing happens. The cost is measured in minutes and patience.

What’s happening now is different in kind, not just in degree. Customers aren’t just frustrated by how long it takes to reach a resolution. They’re frustrated by the sense that no one inside the system is willing to recognize them. The chatbot doesn’t understand the nuance of their situation, and there’s no clear path to someone who will. The denial letter arrives without explanation, and the appeal form leads to another denial letter. The interface is fast, and the experience is cold. The faster it goes, the more it can feel like the company has decided the customer isn’t worth a human moment.

That shift, from operational annoyance to emotional injury, is what turns friction into conflict.

People will tolerate a great deal of inconvenience if they feel seen inside it. They’ll tolerate remarkably little efficiency if they feel dismissed by it. This isn’t a soft observation. It’s the underlying physics of why two interactions with the same resolution time can produce wildly different reviews, complaints, and churn outcomes. The metric is identical. The relationship isn’t.

And the more an organization automates the front line of its customer experience, the more often it ends up on the wrong side of this equation without realizing it.

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The Efficiency Trap

The reason this is hard to catch from the inside is that organizations measure what they can measure, and the things that are easy to measure are the things that have already been optimized.

Call deflection rates. Average handle time. Self-service completion. Cost per ticket. Headcount per thousand customers. These are the numbers that move when AI and automation are introduced, and they almost always move in the right direction. The deck looks good. The board is pleased. The savings are real.

What doesn’t show up on the same deck is the emotional outcome of the interaction. Whether the customer felt respected. Whether they felt the company took their situation seriously. Whether they believed the process was fair. Whether they’d choose the same company again if a competitor offered the same product with a slightly better experience.

These are harder to measure, so they tend to get inferred from proxies. CSAT scores, which are often gamed or unreturned. NPS, which captures intent without much texture. Sentiment analysis on transcripts, which can flag tone but can’t read the long-term consequence of feeling unheard.

So a company can post a quarter of falling support costs and rising deflection rates while simultaneously eroding the thing that brought customers in the first place. The operational metrics improve, and the relationship metrics quietly decay, and the gap between the two doesn’t surface until a competitor lands or a public incident exposes it.

There’s a sentence worth pinning to the wall in any executive room where this conversation happens: customers can tell the difference between convenience and avoidance. They know when a company has built systems to help them faster, and they know when a company has built systems to avoid them. The interface looks the same. The intent doesn’t, and people read intent more accurately than most strategy teams give them credit for.

When Systems Feel Faceless, Conflict Escalates Faster

The other thing that’s changed is how quickly emotional friction now travels.

Inside a faceless system, accountability disappears by design. There’s no one specific to talk to, no one specific to be upset with, no one whose name the customer can hold onto. This is sometimes presented as a feature because it protects employees from the worst of customer frustration. But what it actually does is concentrate the frustration somewhere else. If no one inside the company seems accountable, the customer starts looking for accountability outside the company. The complaint moves from the call center to LinkedIn, from the help ticket to X, from the private moment of frustration to a public post that may reach more people than the company’s marketing did that week.

This is the part where minor friction becomes reputational risk. A single denied claim is a customer service issue. A denied claim accompanied by three rounds of automated responses and no path to a human becomes a story, and the story travels.

It happens most visibly in industries where the stakes are personal. Airlines, where a disruption sits on top of a missed funeral or a wrecked vacation. Banks, where a frozen account sits on top of a payroll deadline. Insurance, where a denial sits on top of a diagnosis. Healthcare, where a billing error sits on top of a treatment that was already terrifying. Retail, where a return becomes the thing that decides whether someone ever buys from the brand again.

In all of these cases, the original event is the friction. The automated handling of it is where the conflict begins. The customer isn’t asking for a faster system. They’re asking for the system to recognize that the moment they’re in isn’t a transaction.

When a company answers a moment of human stake with a workflow, the workflow becomes the story.

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What The Companies Getting It Right Are Actually Doing

It’d be easy to read all of this as an argument against automation. It isn’t. The companies handling this best aren’t the ones that resisted AI. They’re the ones who thought harder about where AI belongs. The pattern that keeps appearing in organizations that are getting it right looks like this.

Automation handles the volume of work. AI handles the pattern recognition, the prep, the routing, and the drafting. And then a human shows up at the exact point where the stakes get personal, with full context already in hand, ready to do the thing that only a person can do, which is to take the situation seriously.

The work the AI does in the background is invisible to the customer. The work the person does in the foreground is the experience the customer remembers. The two together produce something neither could produce alone. The AI lets humans spend their time on the things that require judgment instead of triage. The human gives the AI’s efficiency a face that the customer can actually trust.

This isn’t a softer use of AI. It’s a more strategic one. It treats the technology as a force multiplier for the things humans are uniquely good at, rather than a substitute for them. The cost savings are still there. They’re just being earned without paying the relationship tax that pure-automation strategies quietly accept.

The companies that understand this are also designing escalation paths on purpose, not as a fallback. They make the path to a human visible, not buried. They give their human agents context, authority, and discretion, so that when a customer finally reaches one, the conversation moves forward instead of starting over. They build their automation to know what it doesn’t know, and to hand off cleanly when it reaches the edge of its competence.

It looks, from the outside, like the kind of customer experience that doesn’t need to advertise.

The customers do that for them.

The Real Frontier

Most categories spent the last several years optimizing for frictionless. The next several years are going to belong to the companies that figure out what to optimize for instead.

Frictionless isn’t the goal it sounded like. It’s a useful objective when it’s in the service of something larger, and a misleading one when it’s treated as the destination. A frictionless system that leaves the customer feeling like a number is a system that has won on the wrong scoreboard.

The goal worth designing for isn’t the absence of friction. It’s the presence of judgment. The system should be efficient, where efficiency is what the customer wants, and human, where humanity is what the customer needs, and the company should be able to tell the difference.

That’s harder to build than a faster chatbot. It requires honest internal conversations about which moments in the customer journey carry emotional weight, and which don’t. It requires a willingness to staff the high-stakes moments more generously than the cost dashboard would prefer. It requires leadership that can hold the line when the savings argument shows up, because the savings argument will always show up, and it’ll always be persuasive on its own terms.

But the companies that do this are building something that compounds. Every time a customer reaches the human moment and feels recognized inside it, the brand earns a piece of trust that no marketing budget can buy. Every time a competitor automates that same moment away, the gap widens.

At ThoughtLab, this is the frame we keep returning to with leaders rethinking their customer experience: the question isn’t how much of the journey can be automated, but which moments of it deserve to remain human. The answer is rarely obvious from the org chart, and almost never visible from the savings dashboard. It surfaces in the gap between what the company is optimizing for and what the customer is actually experiencing.

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The Takeaway

AI and automation are reshaping customer experience at a speed most organizations are still catching up to. But efficiency on its own doesn’t create loyalty, and it’s never created trust. The companies that confuse the two are going to spend the next several years discovering the difference the hard way, one public incident and one quiet churn cohort at a time.

The organizations that’ll lead in the next era of customer experience won’t be the ones that automated the most processes. They’ll be the ones that understood where human interaction still matters, where empathy can’t be outsourced, and where trust is built through responsiveness, accountability, and the willingness to be present in a moment that asks for presence.

In the age of AI, the most valuable experiences won’t be the ones that feel the fastest. They’ll be the ones that still feel like someone, somewhere, was actually paying attention.

That’s the experience worth building toward. Not frictionless. Faceful.

As my mother got older and her mental issues became more present, she began to live in fear. She was a woman who never got a driver’s license, so she walked everywhere. She would walk miles and miles a day. Later on, she stopped walking anywhere because she was afraid of the dog that had moved into the neighborhood.

The train stopped in our little town, and when I was a kid, Mom and I would hop on and go into Boston for the day. As she got older, she became afraid of the train, the crowds in Boston, and eventually, the city itself. The point is, my mother, who was fearless, funny, and adventurous, was now living a life full of fear.

Mom has since passed away, and I miss her. However, I am happy that the fear that plagued her life has now ended and that she is in a better place. Or so we tell ourselves. Who knows? Hell, she could be working the counter at a fast-food joint somewhere in the Deep South, and I may run into her while ordering fries. I hope she’s in a better place than that. I hope she’s somewhere without the fear.

But as I do every year around her birthday, I was thinking about her this morning while reading the papers, particularly an article titled “The Jobpocalypse.” I read the thing and realized the article could have just as easily been titled Fear. All fear all the time. Be afraid, and if you’re not afraid, be afraid that you’re not afraid, and then find friends and feed the fear.

Now, my mother had an excuse. Something, a bug, a biological nightmare, had taken over her sweet and kind brain and filled her with fear. But what excuse do we have? Why are we so afraid? I have no idea. Well, I have some idea, but I can’t get political here, so I’ll play dumb.

Everyone comes into contact with a brand. There are 500,000+ major consumer brands and tens of millions of registered trademarks worldwide; we all interact with brands at some point. There are few things more ubiquitous than a brand. With all that presence and power, what are brands doing in this time of fear? How do they handle it? Do they fan the flames of fear, or do they do their best to assuage it? What is the relationship between brands and fear?

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The Fear Economy

Brands are not just selling products anymore. Whether they want to be or not, they’re setting emotional weather.

Some brands understand this perfectly well and use it accordingly. Fear is an incredibly efficient business tool. It captures attention quickly, keeps people engaged, and shortens decision-making. Fear creates urgency. Urgency creates action. Action creates revenue. This is not exactly a secret.

You see it everywhere once you start looking for it.

Entire categories are now built around anxiety. Financial companies are warning you that you will never retire. Security companies are reminding you that danger is always one unlocked door away. Wellness brands insist the food is poisoned, the air is poisoned, your mattress is poisoned, your thoughts are poisoned, and only a monthly subscription can save you from the apocalypse. Tech companies selling panic about falling behind. AI firms are quietly suggesting that if you are not adapting immediately, you are already obsolete.

Even brands that are not intentionally fear-driven have started speaking the language of fear because it performs so well. Scarcity. Collapse. Crisis. Disruption. Extinction. Fall behind. Miss out. Get left behind. Stay protected. Stay safe. Stay ahead.

And to be fair, fear works because the world occasionally gives us legitimate reasons to be afraid. Markets collapse. Jobs disappear. Technologies change faster than people can absorb them. Entire industries vanish almost overnight. A brand does not need to invent uncertainty to profit from it. The uncertainty is already here. The temptation is simply to amplify it.

But not every brand is playing that game.

There are companies that still speak in the language of curiosity, usefulness, confidence, humor, and possibility. And interestingly, many of them are not the giant, purpose-driven corporations that fill award-show case studies. Often, the quieter brands feel more human because they are less interested in managing a moral identity and more interested in creating a tone people actually want to live around.

Take a good local bookstore. Not the algorithmic machine trying to optimize your behavior, but the slightly cluttered place with handwritten staff recommendations taped to the shelves. The tone of those places is not fear. It is invitation. It quietly assumes the world is still worth exploring.

Or think about the small regional outdoor company that markets hiking not as survivalism or escape from societal collapse, but simply as a good way to spend a Saturday afternoon outside with your kids. There is no panic in the pitch, no collapsing civilization lurking behind the copy. Just go outside, the weather’s nice.

That difference matters more than it sounds.

The most important thing to understand about the current fear economy is that the loudest voices shape the emotional baseline for everyone else. And most brands, intentionally or not, have decided to sit quietly while fear does the talking. That silence is not neutral.

When every headline screams catastrophe, when every platform rewards outrage, when every conversation slowly drifts toward panic, brands with enormous reach and cultural presence do not get to pretend they’re uninvolved observers. Presence is a position. Choosing not to shape the emotional environment still shapes it. Silence becomes agreement with whatever tone dominates the room. And right now, the dominant tone is fear.

To be clear, I am not arguing that brands should become motivational speakers. Nobody needs a soda company delivering sermons about hope. Forced optimism is just another form of manipulation, and people can smell it instantly. But there is a difference between optimism and confidence. There is a difference between empty positivity and refusing to turn every interaction into a low-grade anxiety attack.

The brands that stand out right now are often the ones willing to project an altogether different emotional posture. More curiosity than caution. More openness than paranoia. More confidence than panic. They act as though the future is still something people can walk into, rather than something people should hide from. That may sound small. It isn’t.

Emotional tone scales. Repetition scales. If brands help create the atmosphere people move through every day, then they also help determine whether that atmosphere feels expansive or claustrophobic. Whether people feel invited into the world or warned away from it.

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Silence, Presence, and the Default Setting

This is the part most brands underestimate.

Because it is easy to assume the only meaningful choices are the loud ones, the campaigns, the positioning statements, the big emotional swings. But most of the actual cultural shaping doesn’t happen there. It happens in the background, in tone and repetition, and absence. In what is said, what is softened, and what is simply left unchallenged. And in that space, silence is not empty. It is active.

When fear is already the dominant emotional language of the environment, not choosing a different language does not leave things unchanged. It reinforces the one that’s already there. Not because every brand is intentionally contributing to fear, but because systems tend to reward whatever matches their current emotional frequency. Once a tone becomes dominant, everything that does not resist it begins to blend into it.

So even well-meaning brands,  the ones that aren’t trying to manipulate, not trying to provoke, not trying to escalate, often end up defaulting into a kind of careful neutrality. Language gets smoothed out. Claims get softened. Positioning becomes cautious. Everything is designed to avoid friction, avoid misinterpretation, and avoid risk. On the surface, this feels responsible. In many cases, it is responsible.

But culturally, it still adds up to something specific. It means fewer counterweights in the system. Fewer voices introducing a different emotional rhythm. Fewer moments that interrupt the assumption that everything must be framed in terms of urgency, threat, or loss.

This is where the distinction matters.

Because the alternative is not louder messaging. It is not escalation. It is not adding more intensity to an already saturated environment. It is changing the emotional register entirely.

A brand can be present without being panicked. It can be confident without being aggressive. It can be clear without relying on urgency. It can assume competence in the audience rather than fragility. These are not slogans. They are small, repeated decisions about tone that accumulate over time. And when they do accumulate, they begin to shift something real.

Not in a single moment, but across many of them. A headline that does not threaten. A message that doesn’t imply loss as the default consequence of inaction. A product described in terms of usefulness rather than avoidance. A campaign that doesn’t lean on anxiety to create motion. Each one on its own is subtle. Together, they begin to change what the environment feels like. And that is really what is at stake here. Not persuasion. Not performance. Not even preference in the narrow marketing sense. Atmosphere.

People don’t make decisions in isolation from mood. They make them inside environments that either expand or contract their sense of what is possible. And environments are shaped, in part, by the institutions that speak into them repeatedly over time.

Right now, a lot of brands assume that atmosphere is something they inherit. Something already set by media, politics, technology, and culture at large. Something they must adapt to rather than something they can participate in shaping. But that assumption only holds if everyone agrees to it. And increasingly, what looks like neutrality is just participation in the default tone.

Which brings the real question into focus. Not whether brands can remove fear from the system. They cannot, and trying to do so would be artificial anyway. The question is whether they continue to treat fear as the baseline emotional setting for everything they produce, or whether they are willing to introduce something alongside it that doesn’t depend on narrowing the world in order to hold attention. Not optimism. Not positivity. Just a refusal to make everything smaller than it already is.

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The Takeaway

My mother stopped walking before she stopped everything else.

At first, it was just the dog in the neighborhood. A reason that sounded small to anyone else, but not to her. Then it was the train. Then it was the crowds in Boston. Then it was the city itself. Each step outward got replaced by a reason not to take it. The world did not collapse all at once. It narrowed in stages, until the edges of it felt like they had always been there.

I think about that sometimes when I notice how quickly people can adjust to smaller versions of the same world.

Smaller expectations, horizons, and risks. Not because anything physical has changed in front of them, but because the feeling of what is safe or possible has shifted. Once that shift happens, it stops feeling like a shift. It just feels like reality.

That is what fear does when it settles in long enough. It doesn’t announce itself. It becomes background logic. And it’s easy to forget how much of that logic is now shared.

Not in the sense that everyone is afraid of the same thing, or in the same way, but in the sense that fear has become one of the default tones available in almost every system people interact with. News, work, technology, markets, even language itself. It is always there as an option in the background, ready to be selected.

Which is why this is not only a personal story, and not only a cultural one either. It sits in both places at once. My mother’s fear had a cause we could point to, even if we could not undo it. The broader drift toward fear in everything else is harder to locate because it is distributed. It’s produced in small increments, across many hands, until it starts to feel natural. But natural is not the same as inevitable.

Brands are part of that system, whether they intend to be or not. They’re repeated points of contact in people’s daily environment. Small moments of tone that accumulate into something larger than any single message. And because of that, they’re not neutral observers of the emotional weather. They are participants in it. And participation carries weight, whether it is acknowledged or not. Silence, caution, and avoidance do not sit outside the system; they become part of the system’s default setting.

Which means brands are already influencing the atmosphere people move through every day. The only real question is what kind of influence that is.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. Not through slogans or declarations. But through repetition of tone over time, what is assumed, what is emphasized, what is left unchallenged, and what emotional frame is treated as normal.

The world doesn’t need to be described as safer than it is. It only needs to be described without constantly assuming it is closing in.

This is the tension at the center of ThoughtLab‘s work: that meaning isn’t just communicated by what brands say, but by the emotional environments they normalize.

My mother didn’t choose the narrowing she lived inside. It wasn’t a worldview she adopted. It was something that happened to her.

The rest of us are living inside narrower and narrower versions of attention, language, and expectation that we keep treating as normal. And most of the time, we do not notice it happening at all. I do not want to mistake those two things for the same kind of inevitability. My mother stopped walking because she was afraid of the dog. I don’t want the rest of us to stop walking because the thing we’re afraid of has gotten good at sounding harmless.

I was a very young actor, but I was serious, wanted to be great, and was willing to do anything, listen to anybody, to get there.

Or so I thought.

It was rehearsal for Merrily We Roll Along, and it was my first real professional show. The room was the kind of room you don’t forget. Fluorescent lights, folding chairs in a half-circle, the piano in the corner, the smell of coffee that someone had made too early, and nobody had finished. The director was an older man, and he was the kind of director who had been doing this long enough that he didn’t perform authority because he had it. He didn’t raise his voice, and he didn’t sweeten anything, and when he gave notes, everyone wrote them down, even the actors who had been working for twenty years.

We had just finished a scene, and the director stood up to give us notes. We were perched in our chairs, pens floating above pages, waiting for the genius about to land that would make the show better. And I was nervous, because I didn’t want to be the one holding things up, or making bad choices, or pulling focus for the wrong reason. I wanted to do my job and fly under the radar, and that, I had decided, would be best.

Or so I thought.

The director said, good run, I have notes, and then I heard this:

“Paul, you’re fat, everyone knows this, stop trying to hide.”

I didn’t have to try because I melted into my sweater. No one looked at me, but they could feel my shame, and they knew nothing was going to assuage it. The other actors went still in that particular way actors go still when they are pretending they did not just hear something. The director kept giving notes, and he didn’t pause, and he didn’t apologize, and he didn’t soften it on the back end with a joke. He just kept going.

And by the time he was done, I had decided I was insulted, and I was going home.

Or so I thought.

We had a ten-minute break, so I gathered my things and walked outside. The director was there, smoking with a few of the older actors, and he saw me, and he called out, “You leaving?” I nodded, and he said, “Don’t.”

I stopped, and I thought, and then I slowly walked back into the rehearsal room. He watched me go.

I went back in, and I did my best.

Six years later, I was in grad school at Brandeis, and I was in a show, and I was good. I felt happy in my body, comfortable on stage, and easy in front of people. I had stopped hiding, not because anyone had told me to, but because, at some point during those six years, hiding had become more exhausting than the alternative. I had taken up space. I had let myself be seen. And the work had gotten better, exactly the way he had told me it would, the day he made me cry in front of twenty-five other actors.

One night, after the show, I was walking to my car, and there he was. That director. Standing by the stage door, smoking. He saw me coming and said, Hello. I was waiting for you.

And I said, Here I am.

He shook my hand, and he told me I was great, and then he said, “I’m so glad you didn’t walk out of rehearsal. That would have been a mistake.”

And he was right. The note was not cruel; it was perfect. He saw potential in me, and he also saw that I was so ashamed of my body that the potential was never going to surface. If he had pulled me aside gently, or if he had been “kind,” it would not have worked, because it would have confirmed exactly what I was already doing. Hiding. He needed the room to hear it, and he needed me to hear it in the room, and he was right to say it that way.

He needed to say the hard thing, and I was lucky he did.

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What I Think About in Client Meetings

I think about that rehearsal often, and I think about it most when I’m sitting across from a founder who is asking me to soften something.

Sometimes it’s a name, and sometimes it’s a price, and sometimes it’s a position that makes their board nervous, or an audience they don’t want to cut, or a category they don’t want to pick a fight with. Sometimes it’s a homepage line that is doing real work, but their COO finds it too direct, and they want me to round it off. Sometimes it’s the choice to charge more than the competition because the work is worth more than the competition, and they are afraid of how it will look on the proposal. But the instinct is always the same. Round the edges, lower the volume, give people fewer reasons to flinch.

It feels generous, but it is not.

The kind move and the strategic move are not the same move, and most of the time, they’re opposites. The kind move tells a brand what it wants to hear in the room, but the strategic move tells a brand the thing it has been hiding from. The thing that, once named, makes everything that follows possible. The kind move lets the founder leave the meeting feeling agreed with, but the strategic move sometimes lets them leave the meeting feeling exposed. And exposure, it turns out, is what changes the work.

How Brands Sand Themselves Off

A brand that gets softened in committee does not become safer, because it becomes invisible. The audience that would have leaned in because the brand was sharp leans away, because there is nothing to lean toward. The competitors who looked threatening from the outside turn out to all be running the same play, optimizing the same edges off the same shape. And the category fills up with brands that are kind enough to disappear.

I have watched this happen in slow motion more times than I’d like to admit. The first conversation is great, the strategy lands, and the founder is excited. Then the board sees it. Then their longest-tenured employee sees it. Then their biggest customer sees it and offers an opinion nobody asked for. And one note at a time, the edges come off. The name gets softer. The audience gets wider. The price comes down to where it won’t scare anyone. And by the time the work ships, what made it good is gone, and the founder cannot quite figure out why nothing is landing the way it did in the room. The answer, of course, is that they sanded the landing off.

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When the Hard Thing Is the Wrong Thing

Now, here is the part where I have to be careful, because not every hard thing is the right thing, and not every blunt note is a gift.

There is a version of “telling the hard truth” that is not strategy at all, but cruelty wearing the costume of insight. It’s the consultant who confuses bluntness with rigor, or the executive who confuses being feared with being respected, or the creative director who delivers a personal cut and then hides behind I’m just being honest. The director who gave me that note loved his actors, and the room knew it, and that love was the reason the note worked. It was not the bluntness that changed me. It was the bluntness in service of something. A clear-eyed read on what was getting in my way, delivered by someone who had nothing to gain from saying it except my eventual performance.

The hard thing only works when the person saying it is not enjoying themselves. The minute it becomes a flex, or a power move, or a performance of authority, the note stops being strategy and starts being noise. Hard truth without care is just an insult with better PR.

So the test, I think, is this. Is the person delivering the hard note trying to make the work better, or trying to feel powerful? Are they speaking to the potential they see, or to the inadequacy they’re proving? Would they say this if the room weren’t watching? Would they say it if there were nothing in it for them? The directors I trust, and the strategists I trust, can all answer those questions in the same way. They are not enjoying the hard part. They are doing it because nothing else will work.

The Strategists Who Refuse to Soften

The directors who shaped me, and the strategists I trust now, share one more thing. They are willing to be momentarily disliked in service of being eventually right, so they do not deliver the comfortable note. They deliver the true one, in the room, in front of the people who need to hear it, with the weight it requires. And they do it without flinching, and they do it without softening it on the back end, and they do it without rescuing the founder from the discomfort the note is supposed to produce. Because the discomfort is the point. The discomfort is what makes the note land. And the note has to land, or the work cannot change.

You can usually tell the difference between the comfortable note and the true one. The comfortable note leaves the meeting feeling lighter, but the true one leaves it feeling heavier. And a year later, that weight turns out to have been the thing that changed everything.

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The Takeaway

I almost walked out of that rehearsal, but I am glad I did not.

At ThoughtLab, we talk a lot about Depth-Before-Design and Development, and the reason we hold that line is not because depth is a methodology. It is because depth is how you earn the right to say the hard thing, and how you make sure the hard thing is the right thing when you say it. You cannot tell a founder the true note if you have not done the work to know what the true note is. And you cannot ask them to hold the harder version of their own positioning if you have not first proven that the harder version is real, and earned, and worth the discomfort of carrying.

Every time I sit with a client who is half-decided to walk out of the harder version of their own positioning, I think about that director, standing outside in the cold, saying Don’t.

I think about him a lot, actually. I think about him when the easy path is right there, and I think about him when the founder wants the softer version, and I think about him when I am tempted, for my own comfort, to give it to them. Because I know what the softer version costs. I know where it leads. And I know that the founder is not going to thank me, six years from now, for letting them disappear into the category. They are going to thank me, if they thank me at all, for the note that made them want to walk out of the room, and the moment after, when I said don’t.

Because sometimes the most generous thing a strategist can do is refuse to soften.

“Hi, it’s Mon. Give me a call, I have exciting news for you, you’re going to love this. Bye!”

Monica, a friend of mine who is constantly redefining herself. She is a new person every two weeks, it feels like. After I got that message, I called her, and she launched into a rant about society and anger, the division of the country, and gave me the bottom line: gut bacteria. She has come to the conclusion that all our problems, I mean all our problems, political, social, economical, everything, can be solved by healthy gut bacteria or microbials or Chex mix, I have no idea because in the midst of this lecture on what will save us, I was suddenly confused with the last lecture on cold water plunges and the one before that on hot spring baths and on it goes.

Monica follows trends. She doesn’t just follow them; she immerses herself completely and fully. She’s all about whatever new trend will save us, heal us, and bring us peace sans farts. This is just the latest iteration of who she is and what she stands for. I listen, tell her it’s great, and wait for the next missive telling me about naked spelunking or pure bamboo enemas. Her current obsession will change in a few weeks, and if I bring it up, she’ll bat it away, say it was a whim, but this time, this time it’s the real deal.

She is like many, many consumers who spend way too much time on social media. She is also searching for something. What, I have no idea. But her searches lead her down many paths, and she freely shares her journeys with me.

Always changing, but committing one hundred percent. She’s like a new brand trying to find its voice or purpose. She is all in on cultural participation.

Somewhere along the way, marketing teams started doing the same thing. They confused cultural participation with strategic positioning.

The confusion is understandable. The dashboards reward it. A trend post outperforms a brand post most weeks of the year, and the team that posts the trend looks responsive, current, and alive. The team that doesn’t look like it missed something. So the meeting ends with a decision to participate, and the participation works, in the sense that the numbers go up.

The numbers always go up. That’s the problem.

What the dashboard measures, and what it does not

A brand is not built by the things people see. It is built on the things people remember. Those aren’t in the same category. A trend post produces visibility, which is a metric. It produces almost no memory of the brand that posted it, which is the actual asset. The audience laughs at the joke and scrolls. A week later, they can recall the joke and not the company. A month later, they cannot recall either, but the company has moved on to the next one, and the cycle continues.

Visibility is easy to measure because the platforms hand it to you. Impressions, reach, view-through, engagement rate. These numbers exist because they can be counted. Brand memory is harder to measure because it lives inside someone’s head, surfaces unpredictably, and shows up months or years later in a purchase decision the marketing team will never trace back to a specific post. Most companies do not run the studies that would surface it. So the thing that compounds slowly and matters most is invisible to the people in charge of the budget, and the thing that flashes briefly and matters least is the thing on their screen all day.

A team that optimizes for what it can see will, over time, become very good at producing what it can see and very bad at producing what it cannot. This is not a failure of the team. It is a failure of the instruments. But the result is the same: the brand spends a decade getting more visible and less memorable, and no one notices until the budget runs out and the audience cannot remember why they were supposed to care.

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The first thing to go is the voice

What gets eroded in that cycle is harder to see on a dashboard. Tonal consistency goes first. A brand that adopts whatever voice the platform is running this week stops having a voice of its own. The audience learns to associate the brand with the platform’s mood rather than with a position the brand actually holds. The brand becomes a costume that changes weekly. Costumes do not compound.

There is a specific texture to this drift. A brand starts the year with a tone document, an approved style guide, and a sense of its voice. Then a trend lands, and the team adapts the voice for that post because the trend has a register, and the brand voice would feel out of place in it. The next trend asks for a different register. The team adapts again. Each adaptation is small. Each one is defensible. But six months in, the brand voice document has been overwritten by a hundred small accommodations, and what is left is a brand that sounds like the platform rather than itself. The audience cannot point to the moment it happened. Neither can the team. But the brand has become a vessel for whatever cultural mood is moving through the algorithm, and the original voice is gone.

This matters because a voice is what allows a brand to be recognized in fragments. If the brand has a real voice, a single line of copy on a billboard, a fifteen-second ad, or a tweet, all carry the same signature. The audience doesn’t need to see the logo to know who is speaking. Once the voice goes, the brand needs the logo every time. It has lost the ability to be recognized in pieces. Every dollar of media now buys less.

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Then comes the drift in what the brand is for

Then comes strategic drift. Reactive marketing slowly replaces deliberate positioning, because deliberate positioning is slow and unsexy and does not produce the dopamine of a viral repost. The team that was supposed to be building a category presence ends up running a meme account that happens to share a logo with a real business. The two are not the same thing, but the meme account is louder, so the meme account wins the calendar.

The drift is also visible in the meeting itself. Trend-chasing changes what kind of work feels productive. A campaign that takes six weeks to develop and tests an actual position gets compared, in the room, to a post the social manager wrote in twenty minutes that pulled five million views. The campaign loses. The comparison was structured to make it lose. Over time, the team stops proposing the six-week work. Stops thinking in those time horizons at all. The work that remains is the work that fits into a day. The work that builds a brand does not fit into a day, and it stops being done.

A category presence is the accumulation of consistent positioning over years. It is what a buyer remembers about the brand when no marketing is in front of them. It is built by repeating the same true thing in different forms until the audience can complete the sentence themselves. None of that is compatible with a team whose week is structured around reacting to whatever the internet is doing this morning.

The most expensive version is the one that hides best

The deeper cost is that the brand starts sounding culturally fluent and strategically hollow. This is the version that hides best, because the writing is good. The copy is sharp. The references are current. A casual observer would call the brand sophisticated. But there is no position inside the fluency. Pull away the topical hook, and there is nothing the brand actually believes that a competitor does not also believe. The category collapses into a shared register where every brand sounds like a friend group at a party. The friend group is real. The brands inside it are interchangeable.

This is the worst version because it cannot be diagnosed by looking at the work. The work looks fine. The work might even be winning awards. But the cumulative effect on the audience is that they cannot tell the brands apart anymore. They liked the post. They do not remember whose post it was. They like the brand. They do not know what the brand is for. They will buy whichever competitor shows up at the moment of purchase, because no preference has been built underneath the fluency.

A category in this condition gets disrupted easily, because the disruptor only needs to do one thing: hold a position long enough for the audience to notice it. The incumbents cannot respond because they no longer have positions of their own to defend. They have voices, references, and content calendars. They have everything except the thing that would have allowed them to fight.

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Why some brands resist

This is why the strongest brands tend to look slightly behind. Luxury brands resist over-participation because they understand the math. Every trend they join lowers the price of being them. They keep their identity expensive on purpose. The cost of admission to their world is the willingness to be patient with them. That patience is the asset.

The principle is not about price tier. A regional grocery chain can hold a consistent identity through cultural noise. A direct-to-consumer mattress company can lose its identity inside it. Category and budget are not the deciding factors. The deciding factor is whether the brand has a position worth repeating, and the discipline to repeat it when repetition feels boring to the people doing it.

Repetition almost always feels boring to the people doing it. That is one of the harder truths in this work. The team running the brand is exposed to its own messaging at a volume the audience will never approach. By the time the team is tired of the message, the audience is starting to remember it. The trend post relieves the team’s boredom. It does nothing for the audience’s memory.

The brands that hold their identity tend to have one of two things going for them. Either someone senior in the building has the authority and the conviction to refuse trend participation when it does not serve the position, or the brand has institutional rituals that make trend-chasing structurally difficult. Both are forms of friction. Friction is what protects the brand from the team’s own restlessness.

What this requires of the team

Algorithms reward frequency. Brands are built through clarity and repetition. These two facts are in tension, and they will continue to be. The teams that win the next decade will be the ones who learn to feed the algorithm without letting the algorithm rewrite the brand. That requires knowing what the brand is for and what it would rather lose this week’s visibility to protect. It is a different job than running a content calendar, and most teams are not staffed for it.

The skill is not refusing every trend. That posture produces brands that look stiff and out of touch, which is its own kind of failure. The skill is being able to tell, in the meeting, the difference between a trend that the brand can join while remaining itself and a trend that requires the brand to become something else to participate. Some trends are wearable. Some trends are costumes. A team that cannot tell them apart will end up in a costume every time, because every trend looks wearable from inside the urgency of the moment.

The discipline is upstream of the calendar. It lives in how the brand has defined itself, how clearly the team can articulate the position out loud, and how confidently the senior people will defend it when something culturally hot rolls through. A team that can answer the question what does this brand refuse to do will hold up under cultural pressure. A team that cannot will drift, and the drift will look like responsiveness for a while, and then it will look like nothing at all.

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The takeaway

Attention can be rented through trends. Brand equity cannot.

The brands that survive cultural volatility are usually the ones disciplined enough not to react to every wave. They are the ones who have done the upstream work. Figured out what they stand for. Written it down in a way that is actually defensible. Built the internal authority to say no to the trends that would dilute it.

This is the work ThoughtLab is built to do. Not the trend post. The position underneath it. We help companies do the harder, slower, less immediately gratifying work of building a brand that compounds. One that the audience remembers. One that the team can defend. One that does not need to chase the algorithm because it has already done the work of being recognizable on its own terms.

A brand built that way does not need to win every week. It needs to be recognizable, in fragments, across a decade. That is the asset trend-chasing erodes. And it is the asset we exist to help our clients protect.

What do brands owe people who don’t fit the mold?

“I am fat. That’s how I am. Or, I feel I am so. Good people often say to me: You’re not fat. But they lie, and I know this. Then I consider, perhaps they are not good people because they lie. Perhaps they are saying it for my own good. Usually, we hear that phrase spoken, ‘this is for your own good’, when it is attached to something unpleasant. A needle in the arm or ass. A scolding. A punishment. An ending of a relationship you were sure would last until its end, and when it did end, you wouldn’t notice because you’d actually be dead.

I am not a model seeking praise or some twisted late-night eater, vomiter who fears the proportions of his own flesh. I am aware. I am fat. I hate the thin people of this world who say they are fat for attention. Oh, I am getting so fat, they say, as I read my newspaper in the light that is cast through their bone structure.

I am, of course, aware of my size, my shape. I know it is formidable to the thin, the slim, the tiny of the world. I don’t want to put people out or cause them worry. When I walk, I walk to one side or the other on sidewalks and hallways. Subway platforms and all areas where others, people, thin people, small people, acceptable-sized people, may want to pass me, move by me, and get ahead of me.”

• From “Do Something,” in Writing in Bars, a forthcoming collection of short fiction. 

I wrote that. I am also fat. I shop where fat people shop. I do not need a singer or a movie star to make me feel human, and I don’t have a dog in the particular fight I’m about to walk into.

But the fight raised a question worth answering, and the answer is the piece.

The case

A country singer recently released a clothing collaboration with a mass retailer. More than a hundred pieces. Denim, swimwear, sleepwear, and even pet accessories. The line was marketed as personal, nostalgic, the kind of thing she’d actually wear. The marketing leaned into the idea that this was her line, in her taste, for her fans.

The line caps at size 18 in stores. A handful of swim pieces go larger, online only.

A plus-size creator posted a video saying she was disappointed. The singer replied in the comments, briefly: not in my control, sorry you’re disappointed, hope this helps. The “hope this helps” did most of the damage. Within a day, there was a controversy of its own.

I don’t want to write about the singer. I don’t want to write about the creator. I want to write about the thing underneath both of them, which is the question that keeps showing up in marketing arguments lately and almost never gets answered cleanly: What do brands owe people who are not a certain size, shape, or color?

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The short answer

Brands don’t owe anyone inclusion. They owe themselves honesty about who they’re for.

The idea that every brand carries an inclusion debt, an obligation to make every person feel seen, accommodated, represented, has hardened over the last decade into something that looks like a moral framework and functions like a marketing one. It treats commerce like citizenship. It isn’t. A brand is a set of choices about who to serve, what to make, and what to mean. Every brand that picks a clear lane disappoints someone. That isn’t a failure of the brand. It’s the cost of having a point of view at all.

The singer in the case above, taken on her own terms, owes the disappointed customer very little. She didn’t sign up to be a public utility. She signed up to make country records and, apparently, denim. The mistake is the modern assumption that being a hero in one dimension obligates a person across all dimensions. It doesn’t, and asking it to is asking the wrong question.

The sharper answer

But there is a sharper version of the question hiding underneath that one, and it is the version that actually matters: When brands do claim inclusion, what do they owe?

That is where the moral weight sits.

A brand that markets itself as personal, as nostalgic, as for you, and then ships a size run that ends well before you does, has not committed an inclusion failure in the abstract. It has made a specific promise and not kept it. That is not an inclusion problem. That is a fraud problem. The sin is not exclusion. The sin is selling belonging as a feature and failing to deliver it.

And the “hope this helps,” the dismissive little sign-off that lit the fuse, is a brand voice telling a customer her experience is her own problem. It is the moment the marketing layer and the operational layer collide, and the brand decides, in public, which one was real all along.

The three paths

Brands that handle this well do one of two things, cleanly. Brands that handle it badly do a third.

The first honest path is to own what you are. Brunello Cucinelli isn’t for everyone. The Row isn’t for everyone. Supreme isn’t for everyone. They don’t apologize for their lane, and they don’t pretend the lane is wider than it is. There is a strange dignity in a brand that says, in effect, this is who we make this for, and if that isn’t you, we wish you well. My narrator’s voice (I am fat. I say this as an observation, not as a lament or an excuse) is exactly the register a confident brand can speak in about itself. This is what we are. We are not pretending otherwise.

The second honest path is to actually build for a wider range and prove it in the product rather than the campaign. Same garment, photographed on actually different bodies. Inventory that goes where the marketing says it goes. Extended sizes in store, not as a forgotten online stub. These brands rarely have to talk about inclusion as a value because they have made it a fact. Facts don’t need adjectives.

The third path is the contemptible one, and by a wide margin it is the most popular. It is the brand that wants the marketing credit for inclusion without the operational cost. Four body types in the campaign, one on the rack. The mission statement says every; the fit model is a size 4. The collaboration says for everyone who grew up in these clothes; the size run says not really, though.

The third path is where almost every inclusion controversy of the last few years has lived. People aren’t furious because the brand excluded them. They’re furious because the brand told them they weren’t excluded, and then, on inspection, they were.

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The courage problem

There is a courage problem at the center of this, and it is the same courage problem at the center of most weak marketing.

The brave move is to say what you actually are. To pick a lane and defend it. To make a thing for somebody specific and trust that somebody specific is enough. The cowardly move, the one that has hardened into the category default, is to claim everyone and serve nobody.

When the brave move and the cowardly move both produce campaigns, the campaigns can look almost identical on the surface. The difference shows up downstream. In inventory. In fit. In whether the size you actually wear is in the store you actually shop in. Whether the brand voice can withstand a real customer asking a real question without snapping back at her.

That is where brands get found out. Not in the campaign. In the comments.

Back to the narrator

I’ll end with him, because he had the answer before the question was asked.

He walks to the side of the sidewalk. He doesn’t ask to be accommodated. He observes rather than laments. He has more dignity than ninety percent of the brands currently telling him he’s beautiful. He’d probably trust a brand that simply made clothes that fit him, said nothing about it, and left him alone.

That is a kind of respect, too. Maybe the deepest kind.

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The takeaway

Inclusion is not a brand value. It is either an operational fact or it is a lie. Brands that decide who they’re for and say so honestly are doing the work. Brands that ship a narrow size run and call it for everyone are not, and the customer they tried to flatter is the one who will notice first.

If a brand cannot stand behind its own marketing in the inventory it actually carries and the way it actually replies to a real customer in a real comment thread, it does not have an inclusion problem. It has a courage problem dressed up as one.ThoughtLab exists for the brands willing to answer the question this piece is asking. Who are you for, will you say it out loud, and can you build the company that makes it true? We’re not interested in the third path. Neither, in the end, are the customers.