The Light Gets In

Alice meets the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass and finds herself running as hard as she can to stay in the same place. "Now, here, you see," the Queen says, "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that." Biologists borrowed the line for a hypothesis about co-evolution. Predators and prey escalate against each other forever; standing still means falling behind.

We are in that race now, and the terrain underneath us is the second runner.

I keep saying we have to think in dog years. One year of AI capability does the work of seven years of any previous wave. A junior who started in January is operating in a different era by July. Tools that were the frontier in spring are the floor by autumn. That is the building-forward part. The blocks stacking faster than the hands can place them.

But the picture has a second half. The kingdom behind the figure is not standing still while he builds. It is actively coming apart. The dashboard nobody opens anymore. The form nobody fills. The seat nobody occupies. The junior task that used to teach judgment, gone before anyone realized it was the teaching. The shared context that used to form in the meeting room, evaporating as everyone goes single-player. The practice that used to hold together because everyone was doing it the same way, thinning out because the way itself moved.

What did not come clear until I spent time with the image: the speed of the building is the speed of the erosion. They are the same motion seen from two sides. Every block placed on the new tower is one less reason for a piece of the old kingdom to keep its shape. Every workflow rebuilt around an agent is a workflow whose previous version stops being maintained. Every new capability gained is a small absence on the other side of the line.

This is hard to look at because it disturbs the consoling story. The story said: you adapt, you learn the tools, you become a cyborg of craft, and what you knew before still holds. It does not, fully. Some of what you knew was a function of conditions that no longer obtain. The expertise was real. The conditions were temporary. The dog years are running on both sides of the figure at once.

Inside enterprises this gets sharper. The mourning of what is behind is not a soft thing. It is an active force. It shows up as the budget that still funds the old reporting line. The committee that still meets to govern the workflow nobody runs. The role that still exists on the org chart because removing it would acknowledge what has already left. The senior leader who built their career on a practice that is now being codified out from under them, and who is rationally, reasonably, defending it. None of this is irrational. People built their working lives on the kingdom behind us. Some of them built the kingdom. Asking them to turn forward without looking back is asking for something most organizations are not designed to give.

This is why so many AI programs stall in the middle. Not because the technology fails. Because the grief for the previous shape of the work has nowhere to go, and so it goes into resistance, into governance theatre, into the slow defense of a structure that is already coming apart in the picture behind everyone's back.

I do not think the answer is to slow down. The race does not have a referee. Standing still does not preserve anything; it just means the erosion proceeds without the building. But it also does not mean pretending the loss is not real. The people I see doing this well are not running slower. They are running with their eyes on both halves of the picture. They build forward and they notice what is dissolving. They name the loss out loud, briefly, with respect, and they keep going.

What gets built next has to account for both motions. Not just the tower we are stacking. The kingdom we are leaving behind, and what of it was worth carrying forward, and what was always going to fall away the moment the building began. And the people who are leaving it behind, who deserve more than an offsite and a change management deck for the world they are being asked to let go of.

Cohen had it right. There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.

The figure in the image is not a hero. He is not a victim either. He is a person at work, doing the only thing the moment allows, building in the only direction the light still reaches.

That is most of us, right now.