For a stretch of time, our executive daily briefing included a small note about what "National Day" it was. National Wine Day. National Grandparents Day. National Donut Day. It was a bit of color at the top of otherwise serious company updates — a reminder that not everything needed to be about metrics and milestones.
Then something subtle shifted. What started as trivia began to feel like opportunity. If it was National Something Day, maybe we should mark it. Maybe we should celebrate it. Maybe we should do something. Not because it was core to the strategy. Not because it solved a problem. But because it was today.
That's how urgency gets manufactured — gently, almost playfully.
One of those mornings was a day meant to celebrate people in tech. Someone suggested we should recognize the team. It sounded harmless, appreciative, positive. I was asked to put something together quickly, so I raced through a shirt design with a tongue-in-cheek slogan: "You can just presume I'm right. I'm a techie." It was playful. Self-aware. A little smug in a way that felt funny in the moment. I sent it to print and moved back to my regular work.
By the time the shirts arrived, the moment had passed. But they were handed out anyway. The tech team laughed. A few nodded in appreciation. It seemed like a small win, and in fast-moving environments, small wins feel like confirmation.
About a week later, I had coffee with someone from the PR and Communications team. She was frustrated. She talked about how difficult it already was to get cooperation from parts of the tech organization — how the perception, fair or not, was that they were dismissive or stubborn. And how the shirt didn't just joke about that reputation. It reinforced it. What was funny to one group felt like validation of friction to another.
The shirt wasn't malicious. It wasn't mean-spirited. It was just fast. And fast compresses perspective. When something has to be done today, the audience becomes whoever is closest. You optimize for the people in the room and skip the slower question: who else has to live with this?
Manufactured urgency narrows the field of view.
The interesting thing about "National Day" projects is that they don't feel reckless. They feel responsive, dynamic, engaged. They signal that the company is paying attention. But they also create a pattern where something conceived in the morning must ship by the afternoon. That pattern rewards speed over scrutiny. It privileges clever over careful. It makes "we did something" more important than "did it matter?" The artifact is small. The consequences are usually small. But the habit compounds.
This dynamic feels especially relevant now. We have tools that make same-day execution almost frictionless — a campaign, a design, a message, a celebratory artifact can be generated in minutes. The cost of production has collapsed, which means the cost of poor judgment has gone up. When execution is easy, the pause becomes optional. And the pause is where alignment lives.
AI doesn't create manufactured urgency. It just happily serves it. It accelerates whatever direction you point it in, and if the objective is clear and the stakeholder lens is wide, that acceleration is powerful. If it's not, you scale misalignment with confidence.
None of this means we shouldn't celebrate teams, or move quickly, or respond to the moment. It means we should be careful about elevating "today" into a strategy. Not every day needs to be seized. Some days are better left noted in the briefing and allowed to pass.
The real leadership move isn't always shipping something by 5 p.m. Sometimes it's asking whether the thing needed to exist at all.
Disclosures: All thoughts are my own. The shirt was real. The PR colleague was right. My employer had nothing to do with this piece, though they did once have to live with a very questionable t-shirt.