Someone in Your Firm Is Already Restless. That’s the Person You Need.

Early in my career, a client came to us with an idea nobody knew how to execute. My manager looked at it and said she didn’t have the time, but if I wanted to take it, it was mine.

I jumped at it. I had no playbook and no guarantee it would work, but I built the thing from scratch, made plenty of mistakes along the way, and it became an offering that firm still sells today.

I think about that moment a lot right now. Not because of what I built, but because of what she did. She handed the blank page to the person who wanted it.

Some people come alive in front of a blank page. They don’t need all the information before they move, and they’re comfortable starting before the path is clear. They aren’t reckless. They just fear standing still more than they fear getting it wrong, so give them a problem nobody has solved yet and they light up.

Most firms have a few of these people, and most firms have spent years quietly teaching them to sit down.

That isn’t a criticism. It’s what scaling requires. Once you find what works, the job changes. You repeat it, you tighten it, and you protect it. The whole point becomes following the map, not redrawing it. So the person who wants to tear up the map turns into a problem, and their energy gets managed down, pointed at execution, or sent somewhere it won’t disrupt the machine. For a growing firm that needs stability, that was the right call.

Then AI took the map away.

For the first time in years, your firm is standing in front of work nobody has a playbook for. How the work gets delivered, what clients will pay for, what your people should even spend their day doing, none of it is settled. Most leaders are treating that as a mess to get under control.

But it isn’t only a mess, it’s a frontier, and a frontier is the exact condition a certain kind of person was built for. Some of them are already restless, and you’ve probably seen it. It’s the person who’s been experimenting on their own without being asked, the one bringing you half-formed ideas you didn’t have time for. The restlessness you’ve been managing around is the instinct your firm now needs most.

The job in front of you isn’t to find the right tools. It’s to give those people room to run before the window closes. Hand them a real problem, not a vague mandate to go innovate, and then accept that the first few attempts will be rough, because that’s what working without a map looks like.

This is hard, and not for the reasons people expect. It’s hard because it cuts against the instinct that got your firm here. You spent years making things repeatable, predictable, and safe, and now the moment rewards the opposite. The leaders who pull ahead will be the ones willing to let a few people work in the open, fail small, and figure it out fast.

That’s all my manager did. She didn’t have a process for the thing the client wanted, but she had a person who wanted to build it, and she got out of the way. The only difference now is scale. This isn’t one stray idea from one client. It’s your whole business model up for grabs at the same time, with a short window to do something about it.

The Bottom Line

For years, the pioneering streak in your firm was something to manage around. You trained it down because growth demanded it, and now the very thing you sidelined is the thing this moment rewards. The frontier came back. The question is whether you hand someone the blank page, or keep telling them to sit down.