Read the full transcript of strategist and story teller Erfa Alani’s talk titled “Slower Thinking For A Faster World”, at TEDxVictoria, September 9, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
A Labor of Understanding
ERFA ALANI: It all started with sex, and a sandwich, a spreadsheet, and a scream. My water broke two months early, at work, in the middle of a tense negotiation. I was mortified. The team sprang into action, sweatpants from the trunk of somebody’s car, one person to drive me, another to follow in my car. My husband had one job, wait for us out front. He wasn’t there.
We all waited together. Half an hour later, he turns up, freshly showered, clean-shaven, wearing a suit. “I wanted to look nice for the first time the baby saw me.”
It was a difficult labor. One moment, I turned over, I see him watching me, he’s got tears in his eyes. I reach for him, he takes my hand, looks me in the eyes, and says, “I was just thinking, my mother went through all of this pain to have me.” Oh, yes he did.
I was the one in labor. But he was the one carrying something heavy. He came to this country, an unaccompanied child refugee. The day before he left, his mother stayed up all night, making homemade sweets for his journey. He never saw her again.
That day, I could only see what was in front of me, my embarrassment, my pain, my fear, my insecurity. I couldn’t see him, and I couldn’t see what was shaping his response. That’s what this talk is all about.
The Four Dimensions of Ethical Literacy
360-degree ethical literacy, four dimensions. Inside, what’s driving me? Vision, purpose, ego, pressure. Outside, who else is being impacted? Who isn’t in the room? Forward, what happens after the conversation, the meeting, the post, the policy? And across difference, what can I do to honor and uphold the dignity of others?
Let’s try something. In the last week, how many of you here hit post, send, forward on something? How many scheduled a meeting or an appointment? How many decided what to cook or whether to cook at all? Now ask yourself, did I think of all four of these dimensions?
Because here’s the thing. Ethical literacy doesn’t start when the stakes are high. It begins in small, everyday, quiet moments like this, just like learning to read. We start with letters and sounds, and they become the building blocks for words and sentences and stories. And just like reading, it isn’t just about the sounds, it’s about meaning. This is about who we are becoming, and collectively, the systems, the cultures, and the futures that we are shaping.
A World That Feels Fragile
And when it is off, it doesn’t feel right, and this moment today in history feels fragile. We are more connected than we have ever been, but we are lonelier. We have communication channels that favor outrage over nuance. We have AI tools that make us so much more productive, but make decisions about what is included and what is excluded that no one can explain. And we have global conflicts where it feels like any position you take is betraying someone.
And underneath all of this, trust is thinning. We actually believe that entire groups of people are acting in bad faith, and disagreement feels dangerous. So we pretend, or we stay silent and retreat. We avoid difficult conversations.
This is not just a faster world, it is a different world. And like with any period of great change, the challenges that we face shift. And the type of intelligence that we need to meet those challenges also shifts.
The Evolution of What We Prize
Ancient societies, they struggled to survive, so they prized strength. When empires rose and fell, they prized strategy. In the industrial age, we scaled production, so they prized efficiency. When mass media exponentially increased the size of our audiences, we prized charisma. When globalization opened up new opportunities, we prized vision. And when digital flooded us with information, we prized analysis.
The challenge for today is a different kind of complexity. Our issues are gray, and we are not comfortable with gray. And the consequences are tangled. We don’t need faster thinking. We need judgment and courage. That’s where ethical literacy comes to play.
It has always been important, but right now it feels exposed. It is seen more, it is tested more, and it is more vulnerable. Cognitive psychologists use this term, bounded rationality. What that means is our brains are actually limited in what they can process under pressure. That is our entire world. And in a world like that, trust breaks down. Ethical literacy is how we restore trust.
In 2023, the World Economic Forum noted that ethical judgment and critical thinking now outrank technical skills as the most important leadership capabilities. The strategy to deal with this kind of complexity is to ground it in values such as dignity and forward thinking, and to look at multiple different vantage points.
Expanding Our Circle of Consideration
Ethical psychologists tell us that we tend to make decisions that favor our in-group. What ethical literacy does is it widens that circle inside. What is really going on outside? Who am I missing? Who is being left out? Across, what is this reinforcing? Looking forward, will this stand the test of time? Because time always tells the truth. And success without ethics is failure wearing a costume.
I didn’t come here as a philosopher or an ethicist. I came here as somebody who struggles with the gray. I’ve negotiated international trade agreements, built new institutions, provided advice to foreign governments, raised children, and often have got it tragically, horribly wrong.
Learning from Personal Failures
Like this one time, a boy I liked, liked, liked, came to talk to me. My cousin Sakina, four at the time, picked that moment to tell me that she had to go to the bathroom. I told her to wait, twice.