Edition 54 | 29 September 2026

Welcome to The Perspective, a weekly note on work, leadership, and clarity. The aim isn't to add another voice to the noise. It's to slow down for a moment, look at something carefully, and see what's actually underneath. Some editions land practical, some more reflective. All chosen to help you see the pattern behind the noise.

This week's note is drawn from a LinkedIn post last week, about a small pattern that has repeated once already, and looks to be repeating again.

The Baseline Moves

Back in the early nineties, having a computer at home was still fairly rare.

In primary school, an assignment typed and printed rather than handwritten, dressed up with a WordArt heading or two and an internet resource found somewhere, quietly earned a few more marks. Not because the content was better, but because almost nobody could produce it that way yet.

That window closed fast. Once more households had a computer and a connection, the same formatting stopped impressing anyone. It became the baseline, not the bonus. It went further than that for a while too. There was a short stretch where a handwritten assignment started to look more genuine than a typed one, as if the effort lived in the ink rather than the thinking.

We are living through the same cycle again, faster this time, with AI. Take my own CV. Fifteen years of experience, compressed onto two pages, built with the help of smart tools doing the research, the structuring, and the formatting. And I have started noticing the same reflex people had toward the internet kids back then, now aimed at anyone who uses AI well. A quiet suspicion that the work is not really theirs.

But none of it was generated by anything. The judgement about what to lead with, what to cut, what the reader actually needs to see, that is mine. The tool saves me an hour of fighting with formatting so I can spend it thinking instead.

That is the actual distinction. Leverage is not the same as a crutch. It took the internet a decade or so to stop being suspicious. AI will not need anywhere near that long.

The pattern is not really about tools. It is about how quickly the world reprices what used to look impressive. A skill that once earned a small premium (a nicely formatted assignment, a properly designed slide deck, a clean spreadsheet) stops earning it the moment enough people can produce the same output. The premium moves upward, to the next scarce thing. And the people who were rewarded for the previous scarce thing quietly resent the shift.

This is why the suspicion so often lands on the youngest professionals. In the nineties, on the kids who typed everything. Now, on the juniors who prompt everything. The suspicion is misplaced in both cases. Someone with no judgement produces AI-generated noise. Someone with judgement produces a sharper piece of work than they could have produced alone. The tool has never been the point.

What is worth noticing is what happens in the lag between adoption and acceptance. The tool does not improve much during that period. What changes is the norm around it. What used to look like cheating begins to look like a reasonable use of time. What used to look like effort begins to look like inefficiency. The value of the work is quietly repriced, and the people repricing it are the same ones who suspected it a decade earlier.

The professionals who navigate this well are the ones who understand that a tool amplifies judgement rather than replacing it. They keep investing in the judgement. They let the tool take the parts that were only ever mechanical.

The professionals who navigate it badly are the ones who either refuse the tool on principle or lean on it in place of the judgement. Both mistakes look opposite. Both produce the same outcome, which is being priced out by the person who took the middle path years earlier.

The baseline moves. It is worth noticing where it is moving to next.

👉 I shared the shorter version of this on LinkedIn last week:

View the full post and comments on LinkedIn

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The Longer Read

The Water Was Never Missing

I published a piece this week on the country's water situation. The observation the piece works through is not about drought or rainfall. At the end of August the dams were more than 95 percent full. It is about what happens between the treatment works and the house: more than 45 percent of the treated water this country produces never reaches anybody, and the ratepayer who still pays ends up paying three times over.

The piece also puts a specific question worth asking anyone canvassing for local elections on 4 November. Water is not run from Pretoria. It is run by municipalities, and in a few weeks the country elects the councils that run them.

Read the piece

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On My Desk

A message from a friend on Thursday afternoon. Two photos, taken at thirty thousand feet, of an in-flight magazine open on her tray table. The September issue of Skyways, Airlink's in-flight magazine, carrying a two-page feature on The Bottom Line under the title "South Africa Inc."

There is something in that I keep returning to. One of several pieces written earlier this year, still finding its way to someone I do not know, in a seat I am not in, on a flight I am not on. None of that reaches back to me unless somebody decides to send a photo.

For subscribers flying Airlink over the next few weeks, the September issue is worth a look. And a small note to anyone who has ever sent a photo from a plane instead of scrolling past it, it lands.

Closing Perspective Every generation reprices the previous generation's edge. The people who complain about the repricing are usually the ones who benefited from the old scarce thing, not the ones who will benefit from the new one. Which is worth noticing quietly, because the professionals who spend their careers protesting the shift usually miss it, and the ones who quietly move with it usually don't. Keep thinking. Move forward. — Yusuf Visit my website

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