This week, on a trip to Paris, I’ve been thinking about the things we choose to bring back to life, and those things we let go.

The first time I visited the Cathedral of Notre Dame, I’m not sure I really saw it. I can’t even remember when the first time was.

With my parents when I was 14? (I was back with them on holiday this week, 34 years on from that first immersion that made me live there eventually).

Or when I was hauling a group of school students through Paris, counting heads, checking bags, making sure nobody had vanished into the gift shop? Or when we visited with our own girls, doing the same parental calculation: how much can we fit in before someone gets hungry, bored or needs the loo?

Notre Dame is enormous and important. But until now it was also very, very dark, in the literal sense. The detail was hard to make out, the stone heavy with centuries of soot, wax, incense, pollution, breath and time.

You could sense the scale of the place, but not always the beauty of it.

Then, in April 2019, fire nearly took it away.

The spire fell. The roof was destroyed. The world watched helplessly as Paris’ pompiers defined fire ‘fighting’, calculating with the clergy that the windows were worth saving - everything else, all 800 years of it, could burn if it needed to.

But before the smoke had subsided, the helplessness was pierced by a rallying call from the leader, the President. “This will be repaired, and it will be repaired before the Olympics, in just five years.”

The government rallied. Billionaires rallied. The people rallied.

For me, the most interesting outcome from this is less about the money, and mroe about the level of craftsmanship. Craftspeople with the increasingly rare skills required were sought out from around France, and came back to work. They trained a new generation of apprentices in skills that were about to be lost. Stone was cleaned. Timber was shaped. Glass was restored. Lead was handled with care. The organ was brought back.

The building was repaired and revealed.

Last week, walking into the refurbished cathedral, I had the odd feeling of visiting somewhere old for the first time. The stone was pale, the chapels glowed, carvings I was sure I’d never seen had faces again.

Great restorations like this don’t make an old thing all new. It lets us see what was there all along.

There’s a lesson here for anyone who leads a team or a community.

We are living in a time obsessed with invention. The news is a daily anxiety engine of new platforms, new policies, new tools and technologies, new disruption. There are new threats, dressed up as opportunities.

AI has, rightly, been booed in misplaced speeches at graduation ceremonies this year. Twentysomethings are told not to use it in their work, while their universities use it to cut lecturer numbers and even to (attempt to) read out the names of graduates at their ceremonies.

But AI cannot place a hand on stone and know how far to clean. It cannot spend years learning how oak behaves. It cannot stand in a scaffolded nave with dust in its hair, repairing something for which it will get no individual credit. It cannot feel the obligation of inheriting a craft from people who are dead and passing it to people not yet born.

AI can produce. It does not, and cannot care.

Notre Dame’s restoration made me ask: What do we care enough about to bring back to life?

At the risk of offending my parents, some old things still have work to do.

They gather us. They slow us down. They make us look up. They remind us that human beings are capable of patience, precision, generosity and courage. They show us what happens when craftsmanship is treated as sacred, and when public places are treated as part of the common good.

There may be nothing new under the sun.

But there are many things we have stopped seeing clearly.

The work of leadership is not always to invent the next thing. Sometimes it is to clean the windows, clear the soot, remove the scaffolding, and bring people close enough to notice what they had forgotten was beautiful.

When people look back at what you funded, built, protected or ignored, what will they say you helped bring back to life?

The future doesn’t just need some more innovation.

The future needs more places and ideas worth inheriting.