Everyone wants to be agile right now: adaptive – fast – responsive. Agility is the buzzword in many boardrooms and strategic planning conversations. But herein lies a paradox: The very thing that fuels agility isn’t more speed or greater hustle. It’s space.
In 2022, I gave a TEDx talk called The Gift and Power of Unstructured Time, where I told my own personal story and shared stories of others about the power of strategically stepping away and taking pause. While we often want insights in the midst of busy work days and fast-paced meetings, they most often occur during long walks, drives, showers, or other unstructured moments that allow for mind wandering.
Why? Because in those moments of mind wandering, our brains operate differently. We tap into the default mode network where our brains make connections between past, present and future, and think bigger and more creatively.
That lesson feels more urgent now than ever.
We used to describe our world as VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. But increasingly, that acronym no longer captures the depth of disruption in the current moment. Futurist Jamais Cascio introduced the framework: BANI – Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible – to describe both the conditions and how we feel as we navigate them.
In a BANI world, agility – often described as rapid iteration and adaptability – is no longer just about speed. True agility, strategic and thoughtful agility, requires reflection, emotional processing, and deep thinking before action. It requires space.
Yet space doesn’t create itself. As I mentioned in my TEDx talk, our calendars are full and our devices distract us constantly. Our culture rewards action over reflection. That’s why creating space must be planned and intentional. We have to make time for it, because it helps us show up more intentionally and lead more effectively.
Here are three ways that creating space fuels agility:
1. Space allows us to process emotion, rather than bypass it.
BANI environments can produce trauma and emotions like fear, frustration, and grief surface quickly. If left unchecked, they hijack our thinking into flight, fright, freeze or fawn behaviors. At the same time, we might experience heightened positive emotions, like excitement, joy, hope and gratitude. Creating intentional space helps us notice what we are actually feeling because we can tune into what our bodies are telling us – this helps us process emotions rather than suppress them.
2. Space fuels creative problem-solving.
In nonlinear environments, yesterday’s solutions don’t work today. Time for mind wandering can help the brain tap into the default mode network, the source of imagination, insight, and new connections. That’s why, as I shared in my TEDx talk, 72% of people report getting great ideas in the shower. Innovation requires incubation in addition to more active brainstorming or ideation. Taking a long walk, gardening, showering, chores, writing in a journal – these simple acts that create space for incubation can tap into new ideas and creative problem solving.
3. Space builds resilience and wise action.
In difficult or heated situations, reacting immediately can sometimes make things worse. Susan David’s book and TED talk on Emotional Agility speaks to how taking a pause allows us to think about how we want to respond to difficult situations in ways that align to our values. This helps us act in ways that are wise and thoughtful. We build resilience by responding thoughtfully even when circumstances are unpredictable or overwhelming.
In our current state of the world that demands constant adaptation and agility, let’s not forget this paradox: if agility is what we want, space is what we need.
