As is my habit, I like to begin each of my articles with a quotation that goes to the heart of what comes afterwards. Today we borrow from the 18th Century poet, William Collins, who said: “That willingness to slow down and examine the mysterious bits of fluff in our lives, that is the poet's interest.”

I‘m not suggesting that every organization hire a poet tomorrow (though that may not be such a bad idea), however it seems clear – at least to me – that we need to find a way to reintroduce more mystery and more wonder into our corporate cultures. After all, great marketers are – like great poets – sharply intuitive first and foremost.  But what does this have to do with the digital ecosystem?

I have spent the last twenty years trying to reduce friction in my companies. It made perfect sense on one level. Reducing friction meant automating, lowering costs and saving time. Speed became all important.

But something unintended happens when you force unchecked momentum on a frictionless environment, something disastrous.  Permit me to clarify: the stock market has become a virtually frictionless exchange in which millions of trades are executed daily with digital, nanosecond efficiencies. What happens when frictionless automation on this scale collides with investor attitude (momentum)?  Huge, wild swings, margin calls, and – ultimately – disastrous market collapses of unfathomable scale and consequence.

We are we so hell-bent on automating systems and creating digital efficiencies (reducing friction), that quantification becomes the fanatical means to its own misguided end -- a technological imperative utterly divorced from the holistic goals of a company and culture.

We need to introduce a means to throttle our irrepressible urge to accelerate faster and faster. We need to know where we're headed and why we want to go there before we rev up our engines and hit the road at hypersonic speeds. While this may seem obvious, it becomes increasingly critical once we understand that instability accrues as a natural byproduct of unrestrained digital acceleration. Few of us have the vision, let alone the desire to know what lies ahead, yet the imperative to get there ever-faster seduces us like a siren's song.

It's clear that what we need to do is slow down and impose purposeful friction on the system. We need time to catch up with our tools.  We need time to deliberate over and decide what's important to us in our changing environment so we no longer consign ourselves to a permanent state of crisis management and reactionary foolishness.  Deliberate restraint is critical in an age of such immensely powerful tools of scale, and needs to become the number one job function of all senior executives.

There are undoubtedly some misguided critics and otherwise lazy people out there who will misinterpret my call to slow down as an excuse for inaction.  But quite the opposite: I merely call for deliberate action to counter a digital culture of almost pure reaction.  Imposing friction and slowing down, while simple in theory, is by no means easy in practice. It requires a rare and judicious blend of deliberate thought and the courage to challenge our assumptions.  Slowing down is hard work.

Unfortunately there’s no scientific way to determine the right combination of friction and momentum for a company, no magic algorithm. Indeed, these dynamics change within a company as the environment changes.

Deliberately slowing down affords us the time and space to find new patterns in our environment; patterns that our brains are innately wired to seek out.  These patterns inspire our hopes and dreams and give purpose to our actions.  Try it for yourself.  The next time you feel compelled to pursue speed for speed’s sake, take a deep breath, slow down, and think about adding a little healthy friction to your life.

Our corporate culture columnist says we need to slow down a little bit and take a look at where the digital content and advertising business is headed. Deliberate restraint, he says, is critical in an age of such immensely powerful tools of scale, and needs to become the number one job function of all senior executives.