The Bark, the Roots, and the Lightning
Last week I stood at the base of a thousand-year-old coastal redwood in the Santa Cruz mountains.
When you stand beneath a 300-foot tree, your neck cranes back, your mouth drops open and you feel genuinely small. The plaque at the base called it “The Mother Tree” and says (I’m paraphrasing) that for more than a thousand years this tree has been the “elder of its cathedral,” nurturing and sustaining the younger trees around it through underground root systems.
It was raining, and after I read those words I stood there for a while as the words literally soaked in.
Because that same week, I was also reading articles about artificial intelligence systems with capabilities that should make any leader sit up a little straighter. These systems have gone from passing medical licensing exams, to generating indistinguishable video deepfakes, to now writing the code used to build the next generation of themselves at a pace that is hard to comprehend. And the pace of improvement is not slowing down.
A thousand years of patient growth. And a technology exponentially increasing broad swatches or capabilities every few months.
I’ve been sitting in that tension all week.
Fast and Slow Can Both Be Wrong
Standing between that ancient tree and our accelerating future, I had a thought.
There is very little difference between moving slowly with your eyes closed and moving quickly without a plan. Both end the same way… badly. Speed does not automatically confer wisdom. Neither does patience.
That redwood didn’t become the Mother Tree by simply standing there for a thousand years. It became the Mother Tree by growing roots deep enough and bark thick enough to survive every fire, every drought, every lightning strike, every storm that tried to take it down. And while it was surviving, it was building a network that made the whole forest more resilient.
That is not inaction. That is strategy. And it is measured in centuries.
In healthcare, I see two failure modes right now.
One is denial. Leaders who ignore AI aren’t being “thoughtful.” They are choosing not to look. AI-enabled technologies will not pause their advancement out of respect for our discomfort. Not engaging does not slow it down. It means the fire catches you unprepared.
The other is frenzy. Leaders who chase every new tool, run pilots without a problem statement, and bolt AI onto workflows without clarity on the problem they’re solving are not being “innovative.” They may be fast, but speed without depth is just a different way to get burned.
But there is a middle path.
Playbook
Someone asked me on stage last week whether AI is ready to replace doctors. Let me be clear: today’s AI can hold more general medical knowledge than I can ever hope to learn. That means for the next twenty years of my career, I have to acknowledge that AI will only play an increasing key role in supporting how we serve patients.
But the hardest moments I’ve experienced in medicine are not diagnostic. They are human, like sitting with parents while their baby died in their arms. The ability to engage fully in that moment – that excruciatingly awful, excruciatingly raw human moment – is built slowly. It is roots and bark. And I’ve yet to see an AI that can replicate it.
If you are a healthcare leader and you have not spent serious time with AI in the last ninety days, you are behind. Not a little behind. Meaningfully behind.
So open your eyes. Use these tools. Learn what they can do and where they fall short. Understand that the pace of change is not a rumor or a prediction; it is measurable and it is accelerating.
And at the same time, learn how to see through complexity. How to hold ambiguity. How to sit with a dying baby’s family and tell them the truth when the truth is terrible.
Invest in the things that take time precisely because they take time. Relationships. Judgment. The ability to sit in uncertainty without reaching for the first answer that feels comfortable. The willingness to speak hard truths when the room doesn’t want to (but needs to) hear it.
Redwoods don’t compete with lightning. They survive it. Their bark can be twelve inches thick. Fire reshapes the forest and the Mother Tree is still standing. Not because it outran the fire. Because it was built to absorb the impact.
That is the play right now. For all of us.
Your Turn
Where are you in this?
Are you the leader who hasn’t use an AI-enabled tool, telling yourself that your field is different, your specialty is special, your unique expertise is immune? It is not. Open your eyes.
Or are you the leader who has tried every new platform and subscribed to every futurist newsletter, yet still cannot explain the problem you are actually trying to solve? Slow down. Grow some roots.
The fire is coming either way. The question is whether you will be the Mother Tree or the kindling.
The Perseverance Playbook™ is a weekly newsletter about the middle miles, where purpose is forged and leadership is born. Written from airports, sidelines, and the spaces in between by Dr. Chris DeRienzo.
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