Fire and Stillness in Leadership
By Sophie Makonnen
We are entering the Year of the Fire Horse. I did not set out to look this up, but it kept appearing in my feed over the past few days. Short posts, confident captions, recurring references to the same image, a horse associated with speed, momentum, and forward drive. At some point, I caught myself thinking that I must be spending far more time around horoscopes than I realized. Or my algorithm has developed a strong opinion about my future. The image itself is striking. A horse of fire, moving fast, highly visible, difficult to ignore. It is a powerful symbol.
On a more serious note, this kept nudging me toward a question about leadership and work and about the constant pull toward action, speed, and being seen.
A horse of fire suggests movement. It moves quickly, it draws attention, it does not pass unnoticed. There is heat, force, and direction in the image. You see it immediately. You cannot look away. Speed and visibility are built into the symbol. The fire makes the movement brighter, louder, harder to ignore. It signals action. It leaves little room for doubt about who is moving and who is not.
Speed a Signal of Value ?
In many workplaces today, speed and visibility are closely associated with competence, efficiency, and productivity. Acting fast is often read as a sign of capability. Moving decisively signals control. As action becomes visible, being seen reassures others that something is being handled.
This situation did not emerge unexpectedly. Work often takes place amid uncertainty and tight deadlines, where decisions must be made faster than they can be fully evaluated. The limited time restricts a complete analysis and review and forces us in quick responses. And if successful, we are praised for our promptness and success.
At the same time, the job market has become more limited and entry-level jobs that once offered steady career paths are now being replaced by AI. More people are competing for fewer jobs at every stage. Clear career progressions are harder to find. In this situation, being seen is valuable, and staying active helps you stand out.
Speed isn’t just about being impatient or having a certain style. It’s how people respond to the situations they face at work. It helps them stay relevant and show their value when other signs are harder to trust.
The Case for Speed
Given these conditions, it helps to look more closely at what speed enables in the workplace, and why it has become so deeply embedded in how we work.
Speed creates momentum. It helps teams move forward when decisions pile up faster than they can be resolved and time feels genuinely scarce. Acting quickly can cut through the paralysis of uncertainty and prevent work from stalling entirely. There is a real productivity benefit here; the work continues, problems get addressed, and forward motion is maintained.
Speed also brings a particular kind of clarity. A decision, even an imperfect one, can often be easier to work with than prolonged hesitation and deliberation. Movement provides direction. It gives people something concrete to respond to, something to build on or push against. In environments where ambiguity itself becomes a cost, speed offers a kind of relief.
There is also a reassuring psychological effect. Visible action signals that someone is taking responsibility, that the situation is being handled. It reduces anxiety, especially in environments where delays accumulate consequences or where inaction is closely watched and scrutinized. The person who moves quickly appears competent; the person who hesitates appears uncertain or indifferent.
In that sense, speed functions as a genuine tool. It supports real progress. It helps work continue, and organizations adapt under genuine pressure. The next question is not whether speed works, but what it costs.
What Speed Crowds Out
Moving quickly comes with a price. It often pushes aside the work that needs more time. Some things just can't be rushed without causing problems.
If decisions are made too quickly and without sufficient thought or input, problems often surface later. For example, hiring someone in a rush, picking a strategy without consulting others, or cutting costs without considering the future can all lead to bigger problems. These choices don't just fail right away; they cause more complicated problems down the line that are harder to fix than if the decision had been made more carefully.
Moving fast doesn't eliminate costs; it just pushes them into the future, where they are usually bigger. For example, if people lose trust because a decision was made quickly and without their input, it's much harder to rebuild that trust than it would have been to involve them from the start. Rushing can also create technical problems, damage relationships, or cause confusion about strategy. Fixing these problems later takes much more work than preventing them in the first place.
The question is not whether to move fast or slow. It's whether you're choosing it, or whether speed has become your only option.
And How Does Leadership Fit In?
In practice, leadership often involves judging how much time the work needs, and whether it is possible to take that time. Sometimes, you really do need to act quickly. Waiting too long can confuse people, leave a team without direction, or allow uncertainty to turn into inaction. In these moments, moving forward helps people orient themselves and know what to do next. Action is more visible than thought. Decisions circulate, pauses often go unseen. This creates a pull toward movement and visible progress, even when things are not fully clear. At other times, slowing down matters. Time is needed to see what is shifting, to surface the assumptions behind a decision, and to understand how different elements connect. Taking that time is not hesitation. It is judgment.
The difficulty is that judgment and constraint don't always line up. You might know a decision needs more time, but the deadline won't move. Or you see that pausing would bring clarity, but the cost of waiting shows up elsewhere: in lost credibility, stalled momentum, or the sense that no one is managing the situation. When that happens, the choice isn't between right and wrong. It's between options that are all partial. A leader who slows down might turn out to be right later, but being right later doesn't always fix what got damaged in the moment.
A key skill in leadership lies in recognizing when to move and when to pause. That judgment depends on attention, on noticing the effects of action, not only on its speed.
The Art of Choosing
Sometimes you do need to be the fire horse. There are moments when speed is necessary, when momentum matters, when moving quickly keeps the work from stalling or drifting. Being fast, being visible, pushing forward, these are what get things done in those moments.
At other times, the most responsible move is to slow the pace. Not to delay for the sake of caution, but because speed is not part of the solution. Because being fast will not add value and may subtract it.
For this year, the question is: when is it time to be the fire horse?
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