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Pavel Fidler

📍 Zürich, Switzerland

Narrative Collapse: When Organizations Lose the Story of Time

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff defines "present shock" as the disorientation of losing sequential time. Its symptoms—narrative collapse, digiphrenia, overwinding, fractalnoia—are appearing in organizations. These aren't metaphors; they are observable, operational pathologies.

The Polytemporal Condition: Why You're Running Multiple Clocks

Every domain that takes time seriously discovers there isn’t one time; there are many. Musicians, historians, and physicists all utilize "polytemporal awareness"—operating across multiple simultaneous scales. Organizations, meanwhile, mostly pretend there’s only one clock.

Kairos Across Domains: The Convergent Discovery of Right Timing

Every field that deals with timing has discovered something like kairos —the opportune moment, as distinct from chronos, sequential time. But the phenomenon appears independently across domains. When unrelated fields discover the same thing, it usually means the thing is real.

Ma: The Active Interval

Japanese aesthetics has a concept that Western organizational thinking lacks entirely: 間 (Ma). It's usually translated as "gap" or "pause" or "negative space." None of these capture it. Ma isn't absence. It's presence of a different kind. What it might reveal about organizational time?

Social Jetlag: The Temporal Misalignment Hiding in Your Organization

There's a term from chronobiology that keeps appearing in our research: social jetlag. It describes the gap between your biological clock and your social schedule. And we suspect it's one of the most measurable—yet ignored—forms of organizational temporal pathology.

Supercompensation: The Recovery Rhythm Your Organization Is Missing

Athletes know something organizations have forgotten: performance doesn't improve during work. It improves during recovery. This isn't motivational wisdom. It's physiology. And we suspect it applies far beyond the gym.

Frameworks of Time Valuation: A Comparative View

Industrial time-discipline was invented for factories. Most organizations simply inherited it. There are others: task-orientation, cyclical time, flow-based time, relational time. The question isn’t which framework is universally “right”—it’s which one actually produces the outcomes you care about

Time Poverty Is a Symptom, Not a Cause

Time poverty is real—but it's not the problem. It's what happens to individuals when organizations accumulate temporal debt. Every rushed decision, every skipped planning process, every shortcut: the cost flows downhill. Wellness programs treat symptoms. Temporal architecture addresses causes.

The Incompatible States: Flow and the Monetized Clock

Flow requires losing track of time. "Time is money" requires constant time-monitoring. These states are neurologically incompatible. Organizations that claim to want creative work while fragmenting every hour are designing against the outcomes they say they want.

Before the Clock: What Organizations Forgot

Before the factory, work followed the task. After, it followed the clock. Historian E.P. Thompson documented this rupture. Knowledge organizations inherited the factory's time-discipline without questioning it. The logic never fit. It still doesn't.