In her Feb. 12 LinkedIn piece responding to Matt Shumer’s post about AI and cultural panic, Ann Handley wrote a line that lingers:
When speed becomes cheap, judgment carries a premium.”
It names something structural. We may be entering the most productive – and least reflective – period we’ve seen. Drafts appear in seconds. Ideas are formatted and distributed before we’ve fully decided what we think about them.
Speed scales. Judgement does not.
Ann captures the economic shift. When everyone can produce quickly, the true differentiator is discernment. But her insight raises a harder question: if critical thinking is no longer being deliberately cultivated, where will the next generation of senior leaders come from?
Because seniority has never been about age. It’s knowing not just what works, but why it works, and when it won’t. When a tool resolves the ambiguity before you’ve sat with it, you don’t build the instinct for navigating ambiguity yourself. You only develop judgement by making decisions that have consequences.
Speed isn’t the enemy. Speed is a tool. The risk is mistaking fluency for understanding. You see it when a first draft arrives that sounds authoritative, but under one probing question, has nothing behind it.
Put it on the page
I’ve long been struck by the line: “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” Writing forces synthesis. It exposes assumptions. Without a practice that slows you down enough to make sense of what you’ve seen – and for me, that practice is putting it on the page – exposure doesn’t reliably turn into insight.
Leaders who will carry weight in the future will externalize their thinking – memos, essays, post-mortems, strategy notes. Writing is cognitive resistance training. It builds the muscle that speed alone can’t.
Judgement, meanwhile, is accumulated exposure plus reflection.
Pattern recognition under pressure
In wine, my world for over 25 years, you understand this vintage by remembering the last ones. You taste comparatively, contextually, repeatedly. You ask why this year behaved differently and what that implies. Pattern recognition can’t be shortcut. It requires time in the cellar – metaphorically and literally.
Pause
And in a world optimized for output, the most senior voice in the room is often the one who suggests a pause, and asks: “What are we missing?”
The best mentors narrate their thinking. They explain trade-offs. That modelling transmits judgement. Without it, juniors inherit outputs without inheriting frameworks.
Someone still owns the call
AI can draft. It cannot own consequences. When strategy misfires, when brand positioning drifts, when trust erodes, organizations rediscover the value of humans who can be held accountable for the call. Depth in an era optimized for breadth is a choice. Leaders will come from those who make it.
Ann’s piece names the premium. But premiums exist only where scarcity exists. If judgement is becoming scarce, cultivating it isn’t optional. It’s strategic.
Speed will continue to get cheaper. Discernment will not. You still have to put in the time in the cellar.
