The average day moves faster than thought. Meetings blur into one another. Decisions happen between notifications. We treat time like a resource to be mined rather than a space to inhabit. Leadership, in this age, is measured by velocity, by how quickly one can respond or decide. The faster we move, the thinner meaning becomes.
We once believed rhythm mattered. Life, like music, needed pauses to make sense. Attention was not a waste of time but the fabric of it. Now we plan in dashboards and speak in frameworks. We have built systems so efficient that they have squeezed out the space for reflection.
Frameworks began as tools for clarity but have become our architecture of existence. They tell us how to prioritise, how to think, even how to rest. Every act has a method and every moment a metric. We have turned rhythm into algorithm.
Ritual is what we traded away for that control. It was once the architecture of meaning – the slow, deliberate way humans kept their inner world aligned with the outer one. Anthropologists say ritual evolved to synchronise attention: the drumbeat before the gathering, the circle before a decision, the prayer before work. Rituals did not just structure time; they sanctified it. They reminded people that not everything should be rushed because not everything can be undone.
In Japan, a full tea ceremony can last several hours. The host lights the fire, arranges flowers, purifies utensils, serves a meal and then, only then, brews the tea. The ceremony is not about the drink but about designing an experience of attention. Each movement slows the air, each silence marks respect. Even steam has its rhythm. It is less a performance than a practice a way of remembering that beauty is built, not consumed.
In Bali, a mask carver begins his work by touching the wood and waiting for it to speak. He does not impose shape; he finds it. The first cut is a question, not a declaration. Each day’s work begins and ends with the same gesture, a bow of the head, a breath. It is a rhythm of humility, not productivity.
Both acts – the tea ceremony and the carving organise chaos through attention. They use repetition not to automate but to remember. And that is what leadership has lost. We confuse speed with clarity, motion with direction, efficiency with intelligence.
Modern work still has rituals, but they have lost their soul. The Monday review, the quarterly town hall, the all-hands meeting. Each has its choreography but no spirit. They begin without invocation and end without return. They move, but they do not move us.
BJ Fogg, in Tiny Habits, writes that “a habit is something you do automatically, without decision.” He meant it as a guide to behaviour design, but it also describes our condition. We are living by automation. Our days have become a sequence of habits that no longer require choice. Ritual once existed to interrupt that automation, to remind us that decision is sacred.
We still admire artists because they resist that drift. They sit inside uncertainty. They wait for ideas to ripen rather than forcing them to deliver. We revere that quality, yet we refuse to practice it. We treat art as something to observe, not something to live. We want the courage of the artist without their vulnerability.
The irony is that the instincts of artists are the same ones we need for leadership. The artist who pauses before a stroke, who senses when the canvas is asking for restraint, who works through imperfection without panic, is doing what good leaders do. Listening. Adjusting. Staying. The act itself is a ritual of attention.
Perhaps the work now is to rebuild ritual inside our speed, not outside it. To bring back proportion. A pause before the next call. A meeting that begins with silence. A decision made only after everyone has spoken. Ritual does not slow us down; it steadies us. It restores coherence – the sense that what we do still connects to what we mean. It makes time visible again.
Sometimes, when my day dissolves into tasks, I stop and pour water slowly into a glass. I watch the surface settle. It takes less than a minute, but the act reclaims the day. That is all a ritual really is: a deliberate interruption, a way to remember that time is not only for use but for regard.
We may not carve masks or host ceremonies, but we can still choose how we move through our hours. And perhaps that is what leadership means now to set the rhythm of attention, to create the conditions for meaning, to make even the smallest act feel deliberate again.