Rahaf Harfoush is a digital anthropologist, bestselling author, and researcher. As a former member of President Obama's digital team, she draws on her global experience and deep research to challenge traditional measures of success and inspire leaders to embrace balance, creativity, and human potential.
At Oslo Business Forum, Rahaf argued that the collision between technology and culture is creating informational chaos. We're constantly consuming information while simultaneously navigating economic uncertainty, geopolitical instability, technological disruption, and other interconnected pressures. The consequences of the chaos extend beyond just distraction.
Operating in an Infinite Information Landscape
Every day, the world creates an almost unimaginable amount of data. Generative AI is accelerating that flow, giving us access to more information, more content, and more technological capability than ever before.
But Rahaf sees a problem: human beings were never taught how to operate in an infinite information landscape.
Information overload creates stress and overwhelm. It can erode decision-making, creativity, and willpower. And many of the technologies we've adopted to improve productivity and collaboration have inadvertently created cultures that reward constant availability and immediate responsiveness instead.
Rahaf believes leaders need a different approach, and she calls it Digital Zen: a mindset that combines a human-centric tech strategy with the recognition that well-being can be a competitive advantage.
Thriving amid technological disruption, she argued, will require organizations to reframe three things: focus, recovery, and the relationship between technology and culture.
Rahaf Harfoush: Digital anthropologist, bestselling author, and researcher
Reframe Focus: Protect the Conditions for Deep Thinking
In the modern workplace, leaders collectively decide how tools should be used. Over time, those decisions create norms.
Rahaf pointed to two norms that have become especially powerful: always be available and respond immediately.
Those expectations are embedded in the technologies we use every day. Consider the familiar green status icon in Microsoft Teams. It doesn't tell colleagues that we're thinking, analyzing, creating, or leading. It tells them we're available.
Notifications reinforce the same expectation. Email, messaging platforms, and other workplace tools make interruption almost constant. The result is a culture in which responsiveness becomes more visible—and therefore more rewarded—than concentration.
But Rahaf believes this creates a contradiction. We tell people to be strategic, creative, adaptive, and forward-looking. Then we place those people in environments where they're continually interrupted.
"The best technology, the best AI, the best data, the best dashboard is not going to help a distracted team."
Creativity requires something modern work increasingly eliminates: periods of uninterrupted thought. Rahaf encouraged leaders to design working environments that deliberately protect uninterrupted time for deep thinking and deep work.
Reframe Recovery: Make It Part of High Performance
Focus is difficult when people are distracted, but it becomes even harder when they're depleted.
Rahaf described burnout as more than exhaustion. She believes it can manifest in three interconnected ways:
The first is physical depletion: people experience fatigue, difficulty concentrating, disrupted sleep, brain fog, and declining performance.
The second is negativity and cynicism: under sustained stress, people become more likely to misinterpret a colleague's tone, reject new ideas, or react critically to feedback.
The third is reduced personal efficacy: people can become so overwhelmed that they disengage, stop pursuing development, withdraw from teams, and sometimes leave.
"Burnout is a thief. It is a thief that steals your energy, it's a thief that steals your empathy, and it's a thief that steals your confidence."
For organizations navigating disruption, burnout is more than a wellness concern—it's a strategic threat.
Rahaf encouraged leaders to reframe recovery as an essential part of high performance. Rather than assuming it's something people earn after completing the work, consider it part of the work itself.
For example, create structural opportunities for recovery. A 60-minute meeting can become 50 minutes, leaving people ten minutes to recalibrate before the next demand begins.
Reframe Tech Culture: Make the Invisible Visible
Apps, algorithms, dashboards, and devices contain assumptions about how people should spend their time, what they should pay attention to, and what success looks like. When organizations adopt those technologies, they also risk importing those assumptions. That makes technology selection a cultural decision.
"The default feature of the tool will become the default behavior in the organization unless you as leadership make a different intentional choice."
Rahaf illustrated this with two hypothetical AI calendar tools that promise to optimize someone's schedule. One rearranges meetings and tasks to create what it considers a highly productive day. The other clusters meetings so each day includes a substantial block of uninterrupted time.
Both tools perform the same basic function, but they embody very different beliefs about productivity. This is true of every technology organizations adopt.
Rather than allowing tools to establish norms by default, Rahaf urged leaders to deliberately define what they believe first. She recommends creating a beliefs manifesto.
What does the organization believe about success?
How should people spend their time?
What do high performers need?
What does productive work actually look like?
Once those beliefs are explicit, leaders can audit the technologies they use. The goal is to make the invisible visible and restore agency to the organization, rather than letting technology determine culture by default.
Accept That There Are No Easy Answers
Intentional technology leadership doesn't mean leaders will always know the right answer. Some questions raised by emerging technologies are genuinely difficult.
Rahaf described an experimental Amazon feature that could use recordings of a deceased loved one to recreate their voice through Alexa. The capability immediately raises questions far beyond whether the technology works: Did the person consent to having their voice used after death? How could the simulated conversations affect grief?
What looks like a technical decision can quickly become a cultural, psychological, and ethical one. Those questions rarely have simple answers. Leaders, therefore, need to become more comfortable with ambiguity.
Traditionally, people expected leaders to provide answers. Increasingly, leadership may require something different: the steadiness to say, "I don't know."
Create Calm Inside the Chaos
Volatility isn't going away, and neither is information overload. AI will become more capable. New technologies will introduce new opportunities and new risks. The answers organizations rely on today may become obsolete faster than leaders expect.
Rahaf believes the competitive advantage will belong to organizations that develop the mindset required to navigate that environment.
Would you rather have a distracted team or a focused one?
A depleted workforce or an energized one?
An organization that uses technology blindly or one that understands how technology shapes behavior?
In a world where answers continually change, Digital Zen can help leaders meet volatility from a place of purpose, calm, and clarity rather than distraction, depletion, and reflex.
Key Points
Questions to Consider