The Shape of Advice

They didn’t ask how to begin. They asked if they should bother.

I had just finished laying out the case, clean, deliberate, the way you do when the threat is technical but the decision is a human one. I told them what quantum decryption could mean for their infrastructure, what could be done to prepare, how straightforward it seemed, at least on paper, to take inventory, to locate the old cryptographic scaffolding, and begin replacing the fragile parts with stronger, more resilient ones.

This was not alarmism. It was arithmetic.

Quantum computing, once a question for another decade, now sits five years out, maybe less. When it arrives, it will render the encryption that underpins our infrastructure, our records, our most basic secrets, into something like decorative glass: intact until touched, then suddenly and irreversibly broken.

I had shaped the message carefully, not to frighten them, but to nudge the future into view. I had emphasized planning, resilience, timing. I had done the thing advisors are supposed to do: I had made it actionable.

And still, the room was quiet. Not the hush of uncertainty, but the quiet that follows a fact settling in. They understood. And I could see they weren’t questioning the math.

They were asking whether this was a risk they were ready to bring into focus. Whether to lift it from the abstract and give it shape.

There’s a difference between showing someone a path and walking it for them, though the line is not always easy to see. It’s tempting, especially when the facts are clear and the risks seem measurable, to take the next step on someone’s behalf, to frame the decision, push it toward the outcome that makes sense to you. But good advice doesn’t move like that. It names the gap and leaves space for the person to cross it.

Joshua Habgood-Coote recently described advice as a kind of collaborative deliberation, a process where the advisor briefly enters the frame of the other person’s problem, not to claim it, not to solve it, but to help them see it more clearly. It’s a temporary alignment. You share the question, but never the accountability. The decision, and its consequences, stay where they belong.

That’s the ethical shape of it: not intrusion, not detachment, but the narrow space between. You walk alongside, briefly, ask questions that matter, offer what you know without dressing it up. And then you step back. Not because you’re indifferent to the outcome, but because care without control is the point. Because the moment you stay too long, it stops being advice and starts being something else.

So I didn’t repeat the warning, or return to the inventory. I didn’t press.

Instead, I asked what else they were carrying. What other risks were already on the table, what tensions they were trying to reconcile, what compromises they had already made. And they told me, carefully, candidly, about the weight of legacy systems and the limits of capacity, about audit timelines and vendor dependencies, about recent breaches that had come too close, and threats that still felt distant.

Quantum wasn’t a surprise to them. But neither was it urgent. Not in the way a live incident is urgent, not in the way a short-staffed team or an expired certificate or a ransomware note in an encrypted file is urgent. It was a quiet risk, a slow fuse, something you could name without yet having to touch.

Even so, they stayed with it. They wanted to understand how to make room for a threat they couldn’t yet measure, not because it wasn’t real, but because everything they were already managing was real, and loud, and late.

I was trained to make the case. To build it cleanly, tighten the logic, press the question until the only reasonable answer was yes. In philosophy, we called it argument. In strategy, we sometimes call it clarity. But as Robert Nozick once pointed out, pressing relentlessly until someone is pinned into agreement is no way to behave. It bypasses choice, and removes the pause that thinking requires.

And I’ve started to wonder how often our advice does the same thing, not out of force, but out of confidence. We mean to help. But sometimes help arrives too quickly, and takes up too much room.

They didn’t need conviction. They already had plenty of that. What they needed, and what they allowed me to offer, was the shape of the problem, held lightly, without insistence. A way to see the decision without being pressed into it. A way to name the risk without making it louder than it was.

This is what I’ve come to believe about advising, in rooms like that one and many since: you don’t have to settle the question. You don’t have to win the argument.

You just have to make space for someone else to carry the question forward, and to trust that they will, in their own way, on their own terms, and with more clarity than they had before.