Fast alone, or far together?

I recently took a Clarity Break with a book that has nothing to do with business.

The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich is an anthropology book about why humans became so successful as a species. I expected the answer to be intelligence.

It wasn’t.

Henrich argues that no individual human is smart enough to survive alone. He tells stories of European explorers who arrived with some of the best technology of their time, only to struggle in environments where native communities had lived successfully for generations.

The difference wasn’t individual intelligence. It was collective knowledge.

The knowledge that kept those communities alive wasn’t stored in one person’s head. It had accumulated across people and generations.

Somewhere in the middle of the book, I wrote a sentence in my journal:

Tools evolve. Humans don’t.

The plow evolved. The printing press evolved. The spreadsheet evolved. Now AI is evolving faster than any tool I’ve seen in my lifetime.

That got me thinking about what happens when the tool starts moving faster than the people around it.

Like a lot of Visionaries, I’ve become a heavy AI user. At EOS Worldwide, it’s woven into tools like BigQuery, Salesforce, Drivetrain, and HubSpot. I can ask a question and get an answer in minutes that would’ve taken days not long ago.

Recently, I disappeared into the data on an issue we were working through. I followed rabbit trails, changed my mind a few times, figured out what we needed, and came away with a clear conclusion and a solid plan.

There was just one problem.

I was the only person who’d taken the journey.

My leadership team hadn’t wrestled with the data, followed the dead ends, or experienced the moment when the answer finally became clear. From their perspective, I had simply walked into the room with an answer.

So, I spent the next several weeks explaining my thinking, answering questions I’d already worked through, and trying to recreate a journey they’d never been on.

It was incredibly inefficient.

AI had made me faster. And somehow, faster had made us slower.

There’s an old proverb: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

It makes me wonder if AI might be the greatest “go fast alone” machine we’ve ever invented.

It helps us analyze, learn, write, and reach conclusions incredibly fast. A team still has to wrestle with the thinking and ultimately own the answer together.

That’s made me appreciate the human side of EOS even more. A leadership team builds alignment by working through the V/TO® together. Level 10 Meetings™ create a consistent pulse for working through issues and building trust over time.

AI can accelerate a lot of that work. But if my experience taught me anything, it’s that getting to the answer faster doesn’t help much if the people I need aren’t coming with me.

When does faster actually move the team forward, and when does it just get one person there first?