Like many others, I assumed the session would be about AI. Better prompts. Better tools. Better ways of integrating AI into learning.

It wasn't.

The conversation began somewhere else.

It began with us.

Tina spoke about our embodied minds. A simple but profound reminder that thinking does not happen inside the brain alone. It is influenced by memory, emotion, experience, relationships, physical space, time, context and countless interactions that accumulate over a lifetime. Every decision we make carries traces of previous experiences, whether we are aware of them or not.

That naturally leads to metacognition.

Metacognition is often described as thinking about thinking. It is also about becoming aware of the processes behind our thinking. Why do I jump to this conclusion? Why do I hesitate before making a decision? Why does one conversation energise me while another leaves me defensive? Why do I seek certainty in one situation and experimentation in another?

Those questions matter because awareness creates agency.

If metacognition helps us understand how our own minds work, Parallel Metacognition asks us to understand another thinking system alongside our own.

For a long time, the interaction was relatively simple.

Person ↔ Environment

Today, the interaction has become richer.

Person ↔ AI ↔ Colleagues ↔ Workplace ↔ Tasks

The environment has changed.

The question is no longer just Do I understand how I think? It is also Do I understand how AI arrives at an answer? More importantly, Can I design the interaction between the two instead of allowing one to replace the other?

That is a question of agency.

And that is where Tina introduced a metaphor that stayed with me long after the session ended.

The Fast Fish Study

Scientists studying fish were puzzled. Fish consistently swam much faster than scientific models predicted. The models were accurate. The fish were real. Yet something didn't add up.

The breakthrough came when scientists stopped studying only the fish and started studying the interaction between the fish and the water.

As fish move, they create tiny vortices in the water. Those vortices become the very forces they push against to propel themselves forward.

Suddenly, the mystery disappeared.

A fast fish without water is just a fish.

Water without the fish creates no vortices.

Speed emerges from the interaction.

The Fast Fish metaphor is deceptively simple. It changes where we look for performance.

In most workplaces, we spend our time studying the fish. We recruit better people, build leadership programmes, redesign processes and introduce new technologies. We keep asking how individuals can perform better.

But how often do we study the water?

The water is the workplace environment itself — conversations, trust, feedback, relationships, processes and everything that influences how people think and work. Unlike water, though, this environment is not waiting for us. We create it.

A question asked differently can change the direction of a meeting. A leader who listens before responding changes the confidence with which others contribute. Trust given at the right moment often creates ownership that no process can mandate. These interactions rarely end when the meeting ends. They become part of the environment that everyone returns to the next day.

Performance, therefore, is not an individual trait. It emerges from the interaction between people and the environments they create.

Where SHIFT already lives in this

Reading the Fast Fish paper, I realised Grotzer was describing, almost exactly, the architecture SHIFT already runs on.

For years, SHIFT has rested on three interacting forces: You. Social. Process. They were never designed to work independently. Personal habits without the right social environment rarely sustain. Strong relationships without disciplined processes create comfort but not growth. Robust processes without the right behaviours become bureaucracy. Performance behaviour emerges when all three continuously influence one another.

Fast Fish became the metaphor that connected those three forces for me.

The You in SHIFTxHabits^TM is the fish.

Social and Process together become the water.

Every SHIFT habit changes the water in a different way.

Together We Listen is not simply about becoming a better listener. It changes the quality of thinking inside a team. Better listening changes conversations. Better conversations lead to better decisions.

Hero in the Neighbourhood asks us to deliberately notice people solving interesting problems around us. The moment our attention changes, the environment changes too. We begin seeing possibilities that were always present.

Show Don't Tell changes how ideas move through a team. The moment an idea becomes visible, it stops belonging to one person. Others question it, improve it and build on it.

The same thinking appears in practice.

Stakeholder Mapping, for example, is not an exercise in identifying where power sits. It is an exercise in understanding how influence travels. Leaders map who can accelerate an idea, who quietly shapes decisions, where trust already exists and which conversations need to happen before the meeting happens. The map itself changes nothing. The conversations that follow change everything.

Across the SHIFT one-on-one sessions, the leaders who shifted most were not necessarily the ones who worked harder. They were the ones who became more intentional about the environment they were creating. They trusted earlier, delegated differently and invested in building ownership rather than dependence. Their performance improved because the people around them began performing differently too.

Seen through the Fast Fish metaphor, these are not isolated leadership behaviours. They are ways of creating better water.

The Fast Fish metaphor also helped me understand why Tina calls it Parallel Metacognition.

Parallel Metacognition extends that awareness. It asks us to understand not just how our own minds work, but also how AI arrives at its responses, so that AI becomes an extended thinking partner rather than a substitute for thinking.

For a long time, our thinking was shaped largely through our interaction with the environment around us.

Person ↔ Environment

Today, another thinking system has entered that interaction.

Person ↔ AI ↔ Colleagues ↔ Workplace ↔ Tasks

The water has become richer and more dynamic.

The question, therefore, is not whether AI thinks like humans or whether humans think better than AI. Those are interesting debates, but they are not the most useful ones.

The more useful questions are these.

Do I understand how my own mind works and the processes behind my decisions?

Do I understand how AI arrives at its responses?

Can I consciously design the interaction between the two instead of allowing one to replace the other?

Those questions are not really about AI. They are about agency, and about understanding the water we create around us.

What this means for how we work

Our water is no longer made up only of people, conversations and processes. AI is now part of that environment too. The challenge is not deciding who thinks better. It is learning to shape the interaction between all of them.

Perhaps that is the deeper lesson of the Fast Fish metaphor.

Performance does not belong to the individual. Nor does it belong to the environment. It emerges from the interaction between the two.

That interaction is never fixed. Every conversation, every question, every decision, every habit and every relationship leaves behind a small current. Over time, those currents become the culture we work in, the teams we build and the way we think together.

Things will continue to change.

Technology will continue to change.

Workplaces will continue to change.

The water will continue to change.

The more interesting question is whether we understand our own role in creating it.

Fast Fish gave me another way of looking at SHIFT. If there is one idea I am taking back from Project Zero, it is this: performance behaviour is never built in isolation. It grows through the interaction between You, Social and Process. We shape the water around us, and over time, the water shapes us.

References

Grotzer, T., Gonzalez, E., & Forshaw, T. (2021). How Fast Fish Sink or Swim: Adopting an Agentive View of Learners.Next Level Lab, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Grotzer, T. (2026). Developing Next Level Learners in the Age of AI: New Ways of Teaching Thinking and the Importance of Parallel Metacognition. Project Zero Classroom, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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