The Smell of Smoke After Fireworks

Why the Best Ideas Come After the Spectacle

Originally published as a brief observation, expanded with deeper reflections on innovation, leadership, and what happens when the excitement dies down.

There’s something unmistakable about the smell of smoke after fireworks. It’s not the sulfur tang you catch during the show itself, when your eyes are fixed on the sky and your ears are ringing from the concussions. It’s what comes after—a lingering, almost sweet scent that hangs in the still air long after the last spark has faded.

I’ve always found myself more interested in that aftermath than the spectacle itself. While everyone else is packing up their blankets and heading to their cars, I’m breathing in that distinctive smell and thinking about what remains when all the noise stops.

The Real Work Happens in the Smoke

I learned this lesson firsthand during my time at ThoughtWorks. We had developed Mingle, a project collaboration software originally designed to support Agile project tracking. The fireworks moment was the product launch—demos at conferences, feature announcements, the initial wave of adoption by software teams.

But the real magic happened in the smoke that followed. We discovered that Mingle’s true strength wasn’t in being the best Agile tracking tool—it was in helping teams working in completely unique ways develop their own processes. One of my favorite examples was an animation studio that used Mingle to track the development of technology for a major animated motion picture. They weren’t following any established methodology; they were creating something entirely new in the quiet space between our product’s intended purpose and their actual needs.

This pattern shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. The AI revolution we’re living through right now is a perfect example. Everyone’s fixated on the fireworks—the ChatGPT launch moment, the viral demos, the breathless headlines about artificial general intelligence. But the real transformation is happening in the smoke: the quiet work of integration, the patient development of human-AI workflows, the unglamorous process of figuring out what these tools actually mean for how we work.

As I wrote in Perpetual Beta: How to Thrive Humanly as AI Accelerates Everything, we’re not just experiencing technological change—we’re learning to live in a state of continuous adaptation. The fireworks get the attention, but the smoke is where we do the learning.

The Agency Revolution Happens in Private

The most consequential conversations aren’t happening on stages or in press releases. They’re happening in Signal chats, in small team meetings, in the moments between the big announcements. In Private Power, Public Impact: The Rise of Everyday Agency, I explored how real influence now comes not from public visibility but from who’s in your trusted network and how effectively you can mobilize them when it matters.

This shift toward private agency is everywhere once you notice it. The most innovative companies aren’t the ones making the biggest announcements—they’re the ones quietly solving problems in the spaces between the spectacle.

System-Installers vs. Service-Providers

Consider Buzzsumo, a content marketing tool that exemplifies what I mean by “smoke-building.” While their competitors focused on flashy product launches and feature announcements, Buzzsumo came into its own through a series of intimate, informative product webinars and email newsletters. They built their reputation through quiet diligence and a relentless focus on maximum utility for their users.

This wasn’t about the fireworks of a big launch moment—it was about the patient work of education, relationship-building, and genuine value creation that happens when the cameras aren’t rolling.

In traditional business thinking, we optimize for the fireworks moment: the product launch, the quarterly earnings call, the conference keynote. But as I noted in my exploration of AI-powered team structures, the winners aren’t just replacing humans with bots—they’re installing repeatable, AI-powered systems that amplify human creativity and strategic thinking.

The difference between system-installers and service-providers isn’t about the technology they use. It’s about where they focus their attention. Service-providers optimize for the show. System-installers optimize for what happens after the show ends.

The Leadership Skills That Matter Most

The leadership skills that survive AI automation aren’t the ones that look good on stage. As I wrote in 3 Essential Leadership Skills AI Cannot Replace, the irreplaceable human capabilities are cooperation, delegation, and asking the right questions—all activities that happen primarily in the smoke, not the fireworks.

True cooperation isn’t orchestrated by algorithms. It’s built in the quiet conversations where trust develops, in the unglamorous work of aligning around shared meaning rather than shared tasks.

Effective delegation isn’t about offloading work—it’s about the patient process of transferring authority and accountability, creating space for others to experiment and grow. These transformations happen over months and years, not in keynote moments.

And the art of asking the right questions? That requires the kind of curiosity and strategic insight that emerges from sustained attention to what others aren’t noticing—the patterns in the smoke that everyone else walks past.

Questions That Matter More Than Answers

Back to that Mingle example: we were completely outgunned by better-funded competitors and would never win on feature parity. The conventional wisdom said we should focus on building more features, faster. But the breakthrough came from asking a different question entirely: instead of asking “how can we build better features,” we started asking “why do our customers actually like us?”

That shift in questioning revealed something we’d been missing. Our strength wasn’t in matching our competitors’ roadmaps—it was in our flexibility, our willingness to adapt to how teams actually worked rather than how we thought they should work. This insight became our most powerful weapon in competitive situations.

In our rush to celebrate AI’s ability to generate answers, we’re overlooking something crucial: the most valuable skill in an age of infinite information isn’t finding answers—it’s learning to ask questions that reveal what we’re not seeing.

Building in the Smoke

The companies and leaders thriving in 2025 aren’t the ones optimizing for viral moments. They’re optimizing for what I call “smoke-building”—the patient work of creating systems, relationships, and capabilities that compound over time.

This means:

• Publishing less, but better content that solves real problems
• Building for mobile-first and engagement-rich experiences that work in the quiet moments between attention peaks
• Understanding your platform as a dynamic hub, not a static monument to past achievements
• Treating inclusion as strategy, not compliance—recognizing that cognitive diversity is your competitive advantage in an AI-accelerated world

As I explored in Do You Still Need a Website in 2025?, the brands succeeding today treat their digital presence as an experience, not a brochure. They optimize for the ongoing relationship, not the initial impression.

The Seven-Year Refresh

The human body replaces nearly every cell within seven years. Why do we cling to outdated versions of our professional selves? I’ve learned this personally: I used to identify strongly as a “digital” marketing expert, but as digital became the default state for most businesses, that identity became less useful. Now I focus on product marketing strategies and everything they encompass—a shift that happened gradually, in the quiet moments between projects rather than in any dramatic professional pivot.

The most adaptable leaders I know treat their identity like an operating system—constantly updating, regularly refreshing, always learning. But these updates don’t happen in keynote moments. They happen in the smoke: the daily decisions about what to pay attention to, the small experiments with new tools and approaches, the quiet conversations that shift how you see your work.

What Are You Missing in the Smoke?

Today, I see people putting far too much emphasis on the trivial details of AI and automation—the latest model updates, the feature comparisons, the speculation about AGI timelines. These are the fireworks. Meanwhile, they’re missing the fundamental work happening in the smoke: understanding their business information architecture and building structured data assets for reuse with new types of technology.

The organizations that will thrive in the AI era aren’t the ones with the flashiest AI implementations. They’re the ones doing the patient work of organizing their information, standardizing their processes, and creating the foundation that makes any new technology—AI or otherwise—more powerful.

The next time you find yourself caught up in the fireworks—the AI breakthrough, the funding announcement, the viral product launch—ask yourself: what’s happening in the smoke?

What quiet transformations are taking shape while everyone’s looking at the sky? What patient work is being done by people who understand that lasting change happens in the spaces between the spectacle?

The future belongs to those who learn to thrive in both moments—who can appreciate the inspiration of the fireworks while doing their best work in the lingering smoke that follows.

Because that’s where the real magic happens: not in the explosion of light and sound, but in what remains when the noise fades and the serious work begins.

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What patterns are you noticing in the smoke of your own industry? Reply and let me know—I’d love to feature your insights in an upcoming newsletter.