Retreating, to move forward
"The times are urgent; let us slow down." I know how that sounds. And yet somehow, in 2026, it might be the most radical idea in the room.
Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé said it. And I'll be honest — part of me resists it. Things are on fire. Slowing down feels irresponsible.
And then there's the reality of how we actually make policy.
We live and work inside systems that are structurally allergic to slow. Electoral cycles reward announcements. Funders want results by Q4. Governments need a win they can point to before the next election. And so we move fast — and complex systems have a way of punishing that. Not loudly. Quietly. In the unintended consequences that show up years later, in communities that are still living with decisions that looked like progress from a distance.
This is what complexity does. It hides the cost of speed.
Pilots launched before the relationships are ready to support them. Consultations that happen after the real decisions have already been made. Solutions scaled before anyone really understood why they worked — or whether they worked at all, or just looked like it from the outside. And then, somewhere down the line, something breaks in a way nobody planned for and everybody should have seen coming.
The pressure for quick wins isn't just frustrating. It's generative — it generates the very problems we say we're trying to solve. Because in complex systems, when you move faster than trust can form, you get the appearance of change without the conditions for it. You get fragility dressed up as progress.
Slowing down isn't apathy. It isn't giving up or stepping back. It's doing the harder thing — staying in the mess long enough to actually understand it before you act. It's the difference between motion and movement.
Real systems change is slow not because the people doing it lack ambition. It's slow because it's working with something real — actual communities, actual relationships, actual history. That can't be compressed into a fiscal year without something important, and often invisible, getting lost.
So when I hear "the times are urgent, let us slow down" — I don't read it as an invitation to be less serious. I read it as a more honest accounting of what speed actually costs in complex systems. And a challenge to have the courage to say that out loud, even in rooms where it's not what people want to hear.
Written by Chelsey MacNeil