Reflecting on the Slow Days
AI Has Sped Up the Ideas. Has Your Portfolio Kept Up?
In 2018, in Melbourne, I was the portfolio delivery director on one of the largest transformations NAB had run: Right Customer, Right Banker.
We sat in front of the data models for weeks. Around mid-afternoon, late in a particularly long week, the Senior Business Lead said, “We’ve cracked it. We’ve got the ratios right.”
That was the moment we understood how to solve the problem we’d been given. Then we worked out how to show the banker and customer ratios so people could see them.
Last month I watched a similar piece of work finish before my coffee was cold. The answer was good. But nobody had to work out the problem first. Nobody had to fix and refix the assumptions, or ask why the answer didn’t feel right.
I’m sharing this because those slow days were doing something for us. That’s where the thinking happened, and where we collaborated. Now ideas, experiments and outputs reach portfolio leaders faster than we’ve ever known.
Imagine if the speed was only half the story.
What Mik Kersten says
Mik Kersten, author of Output to Outcome, eloquently describes this shift. Once AI removes output as the limiting factor, the constraint moves to how an organisation is structured and run. His warning: “Either we find a scalable way to manage AI, or it will manage us.”
He wrote the book himself, every word, with no AI for the ideas or the writing, because the process helped him slow down and think. That’s what our slow days did.
I keep coming back to Mik because he puts into words what experienced portfolio leaders do by instinct. Across 50+ projects I’ve been involved in, one habit has separated the good from the rest: look at the constraints and work with them, not around them. Start from the future and work backwards. Together they tell you how fast you can really go.
AI is an opportunity. It’s also a reason not to take our eyes off the constraints. Identify them. Decide which can be fixed. Plan around the ones that can’t. Use that to prioritise which ideas are ready to become experiments: the ones whose constraints are gone or managed.
Where energy comes in
Portfolios need energy. People who try things, speak up, are heard, and stop early when it isn’t working. AI makes trying cheaper, and sends more ideas to our desks every day, every week. Silent voices kill a portfolio’s outcomes and its speed. What are you doing to make sure voices are heard and experiments can happen? And do we celebrate the idea that works, and what we learned from the ones we stopped?
Four questions for your own practice
- Is our calendar built for this pace? I favour one rhythm across the year, quarter, month and week, so teams can reprioritise without a new meeting for every idea. When things get really bumpy, go to a daily or weekly cadence for a while to deal with the crisis – then back to your regular cadence.
- What did the slow work give us that we need to keep? A pause. A sketch. A conversation. Have you built thinking time into your week?
- New questions. Not “what did we produce?” but “what changed because of it?”
- How we run the portfolio. Do we track how long ideas wait, not only what gets done? Is your operating model, whether PMO or VMO, set up for this pace?
Our role in Portfolio Director or Portfolio Manager hasn’t changed
Prioritise. Sequence. Know the constraints and the opportunities. Tie the choices back to the outcomes in the strategy. In Formula One terms, the Pit Wall doesn’t drive faster because the car got quicker. It decides when to pit, and what the race needs. It is accountable for decisions made at speed, knowing the constraints, with the podium in sight.
Try this
This week, ask your team: if ideas arrive three times as fast, what breaks first?
Track first, engine later.
Ferne Eliz King helps executive teams and boards turn strategic complexity into clarity, and clarity into results. Get in touch, or subscribe to the newsletter for more.
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