Stillness as Strategy: Designing for Depth, Not Just Speed

Why moments of pause create long-term competitive advantage

A Time to Rethink Motion

In the final months of 2001, the 20th century ended without a warning. Like so many people outside Lower Manhattan that day, I watched live on TV as thousands of lives were lost from a foreign attack on the United States. The 9/11 attacks can not be underestimated, and apart from all the pain and suffering that it has caused, that day the world was holding its breath and waiting for a third world war. I was living in São Paulo at the time, still early in my professional life, and like others from my generation, safe in the comfort that if I kept moving and working hard toward my goals, then something amazing would come just ahead. My colleagues and I worked on a digital agency and believed that progress required velocity and visibility; any hesitation could be read as weakness or lack of ambition.

That moment broke the picture of a future, not just politically or economically, but personally. The idea of waiting, slowing down, or even staying still had never occurred to me as a viable path forward, a strategic move. Something inside me started to question the pace I had adopted without really understanding, where was it leading, what happens when we stop running? Can clarity emerge only when movement stops?

That thought lingered as I packed a backpack and left for Argentina in December, under the pretext to buy a book, “Historietas para Sobrevivientes”, a book I’ve been researching about memory, history and experience as a way to survive adverse experiences. Apart from my job as art director I continued to write columns for MTV Brazil for years, with a few stories about comic books, cinema and pop culture. December 2001 the world had not yet ended, but pre-existing economic vulnerabilities around the world became more evident, especially in countries with prolonged recession, high levels of debt and unstable governments. I arrived in Buenos Aires a few days before Christmas, when the banking system in that country crashed, the President resigned and after violent riots happened I saw a scene straight from Mad Max: Shattered windows, burnt cars and desert streets.

Next thing I knew, I was ready to travel further and sold all my things, quit my job and went to Europe in the spring of 2002. I carried little more than a small amount of money, a vague sense of direction, and a battered Portuguese-English dictionary. No network, no safety net, but the need to experience something outside the frameworks I had grown up with. A few days before my 27th birthday, I made my way to Annecy in France, a small alpine town known for its international animation festival. While others were focused on careers in production or creative development, I wasn’t looking to break into a particular industry but still doing research, observing, and figuring out what would be the next rules of the game, and practising what I would later come to understand as strategic stillness. That’s not a term which I have coined, some pre-existing foreign policy initiatives after 9/11 were put on hold or deprioritised as focus shifted to counter terrorism, there was a broader impact on information technology, including security, risk management, and the development of resilient systems. In my case resilience proved to be a key element to understand things and build a life with more purpose.

The Misunderstood Power of Stillness

In business, particularly within complex enterprise operations, speed is not everything. Of course, in the context of evolving digital capabilities, companies think about outcomes impacting traditional Key process indicators. For instance, Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) is a measure of profitability of the operating business and comes along with revenue, working capital, and customer satisfaction to embed AI strategically.

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