Oh, The Agony
On thoughts, and words, and deeds
Here’s an interesting question that popped up last week: what is a good, professionally-acceptable way of telling someone you’ll take some time to respond to their question?
This came up with a group of executives I was working with. We were considering how to make more space, individually and collectively, for thoughtful decision-making. And we realized that while our corporate phrase book contains lots of ways to signal speed—“I’ll get right back to you,” “Should have something by COB,” “On it now!”—it offers many fewer ways to signal a different tempo.
Of course, there are plenty of instances where speed is the critical factor, and this probably explains the extent of the “fast” lexicon—that, and the fact that offering something sooner is a predictably good way of impressing a boss. But there are arguably many more instances where taking the time needed to think something through properly is more important. Yet the “slow” lexicon is remarkably thin. We have plenty of ways to say I’m moving quickly. We have fewer ways to say I’m thinking carefully.
The problem of what to say is not a new one.
For many years, I’ve had a bit of an obsession with advice columns—Dear Prudence in Slate magazine was the first I read on a weekly basis, and now I get my daily fix from Carolyn Hax—not just because they address the endlessly fascinating question of what to do in a given situation, but because they tackle a second question as well: how to help someone actually do it.
And I’ve noticed that very often, what separates the genius-level advice from the merely serviceable has less to do than we might expect with the specifics of the advice on offer. The moment of recognition—the moment when a different outcome suddenly feels within reach—is the moment when the advice columnist tells the reader what to say.
Not how to think differently about the question at hand; not how to work through their feelings; but rather what words to use. Great advice and a great script are often inseparable.
And it’s not just the agony aunts, either. I have in front of me a dense volume entitled Models of Letters for the Use of Schools and Private Students. It contains slightly more than four hundred pages of letters on every topic under the sun, and it was intended to offer people examples of written communication that they could then modify for their own circumstances. It’s an entire book of scripts, if you like. It was published in 1794.
Meanwhile, over here in 2026, we are all at once intoxicated with the power of chatbots as they become more and more embedded in our lives. At their core, of course, chatbots are machines for suggesting what comes next. Put that capability in the service of a tricky conversation that needs to be prepared for, or a delicate email that needs to be written, and it can produce the same jolt of recognition that the genius-level advice column provides us. Now I know what to say. AI is perhaps the ultimate script-maker.
This problem, then, is a problem with a pedigree. In the eighteenth century, you could page through hundreds of pages of examples of what people had said in situations similar to yours. Today, your chatbot can aggregate millions of examples of what people have said to suggest the next thing to say. And if your thing is less the collective wisdom of humankind, and more the particular vibe of a Prudence or a Hax, then you have your advice columnists to turn to.
But what, exactly, is going on here? Why can a single sentence suddenly make a difficult conversation feel possible?
One explanation might be that we struggle to translate feelings into words. The feelings are right there trying to get out; the words are what allow us to express them. The script is the conduit by which our feelings reach the outside world; and the struggle to find the right words is the struggle to find words that match our pre-existing feelings.
So we try one form of words, and then another, and tweak and adjust—aided by the technology of our choice, or none at all—until we find something that fits.
This explanation feels safe—the words are mutable; the feelings are sacrosanct, sovereign—but I’m not sure that it’s right.
The leaders I was talking with last week were not carrying around a finished thought and just waiting for the right words to pop up so they could communicate it to others. The process, for them, wasn’t as simple as feelings-to-words.
Instead, the search for the right words (and the realization of the abundance of fast words and the scarcity of slow words) helped refine and clarify the underlying idea—which then helped refine the words, which in turn helped clarify the thought, and so on. The attempt to find words for a particular thought or feeling helped shape that feeling.
Indeed, one of the most interesting insights of our discussion was that the opposite of the word fast, in a corporate setting, isn’t slow, because slow says something about speed but not much about depth.
The word that unlocked the idea was deliberative.
And once that word appeared, the thing itself—the virtue of taking time when the situation demanded it—became easier to see. But the word did more than that. It also cast its opposite in a new light. The rapid-response, always-on mode was no longer merely fast; it was also, potentially, un-deliberative.
Seen in this light, the script—or the right phrase, or the perfect word—becomes more than a useful tool for advice columns and awkward conversations. If words help us shape our thoughts, it’s likely they can shape our behaviors, too.
Suppose you want a team leader to be better at creating engagement on their team. You might give them their engagement scores and ask them to come up with a plan to improve them; or you might send them to training on how to be a servant-leader; or you might in some other way try to change how they think about the way to lead.
But you might also do something rather different. You might tell them to ask each team member every week, “How can I help you?” and then to react in a sensible way to whatever the team member says. Start not with the thought, but with the words and the deeds.
Now, that question asked a single time will not produce an immediate transformation. But repeated week-in, week-out, to every member of a team, it can shift the mindset of a leader from someone who directs a team to someone who attends to a team. Increased engagement follows—at least, it has done every time I have introduced this ritual.
We tend to describe something as “scripted” when we want to suggest it is somehow inauthentic. Perhaps, though, the scripts aren’t a substitute for thought, but rather a way to unlock it. Perhaps the right words feel right because they help us claim greater sovereignty over our ideas, because they help us hone them, and because, as a result, they help us articulate them as our own. And perhaps, every so often, they help us act differently, too.
It’s worth thinking about, at any rate. And if you don’t mind, I’ll get back to you on that one in a couple of days.
In addition to writing about work, I advise businesses around the world on leadership, performance, and people. If you’d like to explore how I can help your organization, please check out my website here.
Profound in it's simplicity!