Too Fast To Think: The Sloth Strategy For Better Decisions

A homemade billy cart hurtles downhill through a suburban intersection. A keynote slide turns into an entirely new workshop framework. A conference room applauds the removal of friction from modern work. Somewhere in Costa Rica, a sloth hangs completely still above a parked car while a group of humans walk straight past it.

None of these things seem connected.
Until they do.

This episode sits inside that moment.

The realization that maybe we haven’t just sped our systems up, but quietly removed many of the natural stopping cues that used to regulate us. Waiting. Friction. Pause points. The moments where thinking had time to catch up with momentum.

Using a biomimicry lens, Pia explores what sloths are actually optimised for - conserving energy, reducing unnecessary movement, and being highly selective about when effort is worth the cost.

Not as metaphor.
As biological strategy.

Because maybe intelligence isn’t just about how quickly you move anymore.

Maybe it’s about knowing when to pause.

Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.

Biology: Sloths conserve energy through exceptionally slow metabolisms, camouflage, and specialised low-movement survival strategies.

Principle: Build systems that reduce unnecessary activation and make stability the default rather than relying on constant active effort.

Application: Reframing how humans design attention, work, and decision-making systems in environments increasingly optimised for constant responsiveness and escalation.

S2E09

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Have you ever looked up from your laptop and realized you've got 17 tabs open for half-finished projects and absolutely no memory of deciding to start any of them? And somehow, despite all of it, you just keep opening more. Here's what nobody at a productivity conference will tell you. The friction you've been optimizing away might have been the only thing stopping you from completely losing the plot. I'm Pia. This is Feral by Design. And this week, the animal that cracked this problem is not the one you'd expect. We're talking about sloths. So when I was a kid, my bestie next door, let's call him David, and I, we built a Billy Cart. And when I say built, I mean two or three planks of wood, some terrifying stolen little wheels, I think they were. And all wrapped in what I can only say is an inadequate relationship with risk. And around the corner from where we lived was a quiet, steep street on this massive hill, like a proper hill, the kind where your stomach, you know, drops a little even driving down it. And naturally, we looked at that and thought, excellent. Let's launch ourselves down it at speed. Now, technically, this Billy Cart did have brakes. Well, a brake. And by that I mean there was a tiny piece of wood, like an old wooden ruler style, jammed against the back wheel that you yanked by hand if things got a little sketchy. We did at least steal a brother's yellow L plate to put on the back. Made all the difference. And every run, David and I would egg each other on. Higher, faster, later braking, dumber ideas. The thrill of it wasn't just the speed, it was the escalation. And the genuinely stupid part was halfway down, where the hilly road crossed our street, which was not a main road, but just like a normal suburban street. But when you're flying downhill with a piece of wood for a break, I reckon you stop caring about the distinction. And we would absolutely fly through that intersection. If my parents are listening now, they're gonna have me for this. No proper stopping capacity, no real steering, did that with our feet, just two kids hurtling downhill, powered almost entirely by this mutual excitement and poor judgment. It was just quietly really good times. It wasn't the recklessness, it was the egging on itself that was the mechanism. And honestly, some days, these days, AI feels a bit like David 40 years later. Not because it's evil at all, and not because it's ruining humanity or anything like that. Nothing like that. But because every time I go, hey, what if we tried this? It goes, yeah, and what if we also did this? And suddenly it's three hours later, and I've gone from preparing one keynote slide to redesigning an entire workshop framework, writing half a podcast episode, and mentally launching myself down another bloody metaphorical hill with a toothpick for a brake system. It's that same feeling of mutual escalation that I had with David all those years ago. I throw out an idea, it throws one back, and suddenly, you know, we're both halfway down the bloody hill again with cortisol and adrenaline pumping out of every pore. This week I was at a conference and the energy in the room was excellent. All around speed and effectiveness and automation and AI. Remove the friction, compress the process, accelerate all of it. And look, I totally get it. I use these tools too, clearly. But sitting there, I kept having this strange feeling, like we've gotten really good at removing friction without always asking what the friction was actually doing for us. It's a bit like removing every red light from a whole city because stopping feels inefficient. It sounds great until nobody can merge safely anymore. Because friction used to end things, right? You'd run out of time, you'd run out of energy, you'd need another person, you'd sleep on it, miss the train, you'd hit some kind of stopping point or pause point. We remove the waiting, and it turns out that the waiting was sometimes where the thinking happened. It's a bit like a night out for those that remember them. You know how every change of venue creates a little pause point, a point of reflection just for a second where you can choose whether you actually want to keep going to the next one, whether you should go somewhere else, or whether you should probably call it a night. And I think a lot of our modern systems have quietly removed those moments. It just becomes one long continuous stream of possibility and activation. The river just keeps opening another idea, another optimization, another possibility, another thing you could technically do, another thing that if I don't do, am I missing out? And for people like me, curious people, why not people, people who genuinely love ideas and possibility and making things, that's exhilarating. I actually think that's important to say out loud because I don't think this is just about burnout. I think sometimes it's overstimulation through possibility. That's a very different thing to fix. AI didn't create my curiosity, it removed the friction that used to contain it. And weirdly, while all this has been rattling around in my head, I keep thinking about sloths. Which brings me to one of the most misunderstood animals on Earth. And actually, before we go any further, I'm going to slow down a bit here. Deliberately. Partly because this animal deserves it. And partly because if your nervous system starts getting a little impatient with the pace, that's probably useful information for you. Because sloths have absolutely shocking PR. We literally turned them into a synonym for moral failure, lazy, inactive, unmotivated. One of the seven deadly sins. Quick aside, I'm struggling to speak slowly, as I am sure you now can appreciate. Meanwhile, biologically for the sloth, everything about it is organized around energy. I spent some time in Costa Rica a few years ago doing some field work and became slightly obsessed with sloths. Every time we saw one, we'd completely lose it. So one day we went out again hoping for more. Wandering through the trees, spotting howler monkeys and toucans, flashes of movement everywhere. But weirdly, no sloths that day. Eventually we gave up and headed back to the car. And there he was, hanging right above our car, completely still, completely unbothered. And I remember laughing because once you saw him, he suddenly felt incredibly obvious. Not hidden exactly, just operating at a pace and frequency our brains weren't really built to notice. Which, the more I think about sloths, might actually be the entire strategy. Their metabolism is extraordinarily slow, among the slowest of any mammal. And they live mostly on leaves, which are a genuinely hard food source, very low energy, really difficult to digest. Not exactly nature's protein shake. So every movement matters. And when you watch a sloth move, it almost looks unreal. Like the footage is buffering. Slow reach, slow grip, slow blink. And after a while, something interesting starts happening in your own body. Your nervous system begins fighting the pace. You want them to hurry up. You suddenly realize how deeply your own system expects responsiveness at speed. And honestly, you'd think this strategy wouldn't work. On principle, it should be outrun by predators, beaten to resources, like an evolutionary dead end, right? And yet, look at it, sloths have been here for millions of years. The sloth isn't malfunctioning, it's exquisitely calibrated. Moving quickly through the canopy would burn energy that they can't easily replace. It'd also make them dramatically more visible to predators like harpy eagles, which hunt by movement. So the sloth survives partly by not constantly activating the system around it. And this is where it gets genuinely, I think, beautiful. Algae grows in the grooves of each hair shaft in their fur. I can just hear some of you going, oh gross! But it gives them a faint green tinge in the right light. Importantly, from above, they stop looking like an animal and they start looking like part of the tree. Their stillness isn't rest, it's active concealment. And their grip tells you everything about how this animal evolved. Three-toad sloths have specially designed tendons and limbs that let them hang. So that means they can stay suspended there for hours upside down in a tree without constantly burning energy to hold on. Almost no muscular effort at all. And it's kind of incredible when you think about it. They're not endlessly exerting effort to stay attached. There's a really powerful design principle in there. Build systems where stability doesn't rely on constant active effort. A lot of us are already doing versions of this or trying to anyway. We just don't always recognize it as intelligence. Protecting thinking space, silencing notifications, buffers and calendars, distributing decisions, that kind of thing. But maybe the sloth helps us see those things a bit differently. Not as coping, but as design. The default setting is stability, which honestly feels like the exact opposite of modern human life, don't you think? Stillness is literally designed into the system. Now, importantly, the sloth is not minimizing all expenditure because once a week, this is so random, sloths descend all the way from the safety of the canopy of the trees at the top down to the forest floor to defecate, which is metabolically expensive. I'm sure it feels amazing, but it's expensive. It's slow and it's dangerous. Scientists still debate exactly why they do it, but regardless of the reason, the point is even the sloth spends energy where it matters. Conservation isn't the same as avoidance. Some things are worth the energy and some things are worth the risk. Some descents matter. This isn't an organism avoiding all effort. It's an organism extraordinarily selective about what effort is worth. And I think that's the part that I've completely misunderstood until now. Because human systems increasingly reward visible motion, don't we? Responsiveness, juggling things, uh, constantly engaged, fast replies, fast output, doing. And I wonder sometimes whether we've built systems that genuinely can't tell the difference between movement and intelligence anymore. Can you think of a time where you've been sitting in a workspace or otherwise and you're actually just trying to think. And you've had someone going, Hey, penny for your thoughts, or are you right there? Or you know, those sorts of things. You were thinking. It just wasn't recognized. You see it everywhere. The person replying instantly in meetings looks engaged. The overloaded leader becomes essential. The frantic person looks important. Meanwhile, the quieter person actually thinking can almost look underdone by comparison. And some of the smartest work I've ever seen inside organizations has looked surprisingly slow from the outside. Teams taking time to think together before charging ahead. I was talking about this at the conference with a CFO who asked how to get fewer decisions landing on his desk. And my answer wasn't work faster. It was almost the opposite. Slow down slightly upstream. Bring more people into the thinking, and yeah, it can feel slower initially. But then the whole system starts moving with less glitch, less rework, less correction downstream. Nature does this constantly, by the way. It spends enormous energy on sensing and calibration and feedback because correction later is expensive, right? And I think that's why the sloth got under my skin this week. Not because I want humans to become sloths. God no. Your cardiovascular system would like a word. And this isn't a podcast arguing for sedentary lifestyles at all. It's an episode about being more selective where your energy goes. Because I think we're increasingly living with fewer and fewer of those natural stopping cues because we used to call them friction. Every single time I have a thought and I throw it to AI, I get this response, yes, sure, that's a great idea. How do you think we should do it? And I'm like, oh, I'd kind of love every now and again to just get the response of no, that's out of your lane, or no, that's not doable. And when that happens, we start relying on individual self-restraint. And honestly, I don't know about you, but that self-restraint is exhausting. Whether it's diets or whether it's workload or socializing or whatever. Nature rarely relies on heroic restraint. It tends to shape conditions instead. Maybe the smarter question isn't how do I become so disciplined? Maybe it's more what kind of system am I sitting inside that I can affect and change? Where are there no stopping cues now? Where is this environment constantly inviting more expansion and escalation? Becoming more selective about where your energy goes, creating conditions that carry some of the load instead of relying on ourselves to have this endless self-control all the time. Some things genuinely deserve our fire hose of enthusiasm. What? I don't know. You know, some conversations matter, some decisions need speed, and some downhill runs are, you know, kind of worth taking. But am I choosing this or just reacting to whatever's grabbing at me right now? Because we've made not constantly responding feel vaguely wrong somehow. It's like, oh, they haven't responded. It's been ours. Why haven't they responded? Oh, you're hopeless. You never respond. Any of those sound familiar? And maybe that's why this animal feels strangely radical right now. The sloth isn't lazy, it's incredibly selective. And honestly, I kind of want to reclaim that. Not as a cute metaphor, but as biomimicry. I'm taking cues from the sloth's real strategies of conserving energy, reducing unnecessary movement, and being selective about when to act. I want to be able to say, I'm in sloth mode today, and have that not mean I'm checked out, unmotivated, passive. I want it to mean I'm being selective about where I expend my energy. I'm eating leaves here, people. I'm not reacting to every piece of stimulus just because it grabs me or it's arrived. I'm shaping conditions instead of relying on this heroic, exhausting self-control that I'm not all that good at anyway. And I'm still, that's a hard one for me, because stillness is the strategy. The sloth seems incredibly clear about something we're getting a bit blurry on. It's always been a sign of intelligence to be quick. Quick thinking, quick witted, quick output. But maybe in this brave new world we have, the one wearing the smart pants is the one being selective, knowing when to pause. I'm gonna try this on for size this week. I'm Pia, and I'm a sloth by design. Nature runs on feedback loops, and Ferrell does too. Here's something Claire from the UK sent me a while ago that suddenly felt really relevant this week. This isn't a podcast you have on in the background. It's more like a chapter in a book. Something you actually sit with. Thanks, Claire. How's that for sloth intelligence?