Slow Down

"Slow down, you're doin' fine. You can't be everything you wanna be before your time."

I've been listening to this song a lot recently. It's Vienna by Billy Joel. Each time I hear it, it gets me thinking about what my own Vienna is, and the trap we can so easily fall into: confusing speed with value. Billy Joel describes Vienna as a metaphor for the rest of your life, reminding us that, ultimately, "Vienna waits for you."

I had it playing on the flight home from Sydney, where I'd just spent a day at IIBA's BA Leadership Summit with BA leaders from across Australia and New Zealand. A full day of case studies, panels, and hallway conversations, circling three questions: how do we prove our value to executives, how do we handle AI, and how do we lead our teams through change without losing them along the way. 

It made me think about my early career. I remember how eager I was to learn, and how frustrated I got watching others with more experience make complex things look so incredibly simple. I'd have given anything to magically be that good overnight. Today, I see that same desire in young people entering the workforce, and I heard it in Sydney, in leaders asking how to get their teams articulating value to executives faster, how to compress years of instinct into a slide deck.

Back when I was starting out, I didn't realise that expertise takes time. Over the years, I've built a library of experiences, knowledge, and as a colleague beautifully put it recently, 'patterns.' It's these patterns that form the basis of the value I bring to my role at Redvespa. To me, these patterns are deeply human and complex; they are made of raw emotions. They are the frustration of losing control of a workshop, the regret of an ill-timed comment, the thrill of making a genuine connection with a challenging stakeholder, and the pure joy of delivering projects that quite literally change people's lives.

AI cannot replace professional judgement

In the age of artificial intelligence where human emotion is mimicked, I really do believe the skills and judgment of great Business Analysts will not only be needed, but will be critical to ensure this technology is incorporated effectively into organisations. At the BA Leadership Summit in Sydney, this belief was reinforced by the formal sessions and my informal discussions with attendees. 

"AI solutionism" is here, bringing with it the risk of automating bad processes at alarming speed and scale. We are looking at a future with thousands of autonomous agents running concurrently, making decisions by themselves, the impacts of which may not be fully understood until it is too late.

The future is exciting, and organisations must move at pace to remain competitive. But moving at an extraordinary speed in the wrong direction, or running in circles faster, will never give you a competitive edge. This was the real thread running through the organisational change conversations too: know where you're headed before you pick up speed.

AI is not a strategy

We need to slow down and consider our Vienna.

AI is not a strategy. It is a solution, but it is not the only solution.

As Business Analysts, we face a dual challenge: we must figure out what AI means for our own profession while simultaneously helping organisations focus on genuine outcomes rather than just enabling the latest tech.

How do we do that? By helping organisations see AI not as a strategy, but as a capability within a structured operating model. To achieve this, BAs must add business and information architecture to our toolkits.

The future of BA

Business Analysis isn't going anywhere, but we must adapt. We need to move away from detailed, functional execution; let AI churn through the vast mountains of data it is so good at. Instead, our focus must elevate to a strategic skill set centred on organisational capability, human judgment, and robust risk management.

The agentic enterprise is coming, and it’s going to require discipline and judgement to build it. Let's not just watch AI happen. Let Business Analysts lead the way toward the intentional, value-driven deployment of these tools.

I flew out of Sydney with a stack of notes and one plain realisation. Every leader in that room, myself included, is still building their patterns. None of us arrive finished, and no amount of AI will get us there any faster. 

So slow down. You're doing fine.

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Matt is Redvespa's Head of Consulting. His latest challenge involves an incredible amount of human judgment and just might be the hardest challenge of his career: compiling a playlist of his 100 favourite songs of all time. We don't know if Vienna will make the cut.

Header image: statue of Pegasus in Vienna, photo by Sami Ullah on Unsplash.‍