Discovery series

Discovery series

The Three Durations: Seeing the Timescales Your Organization Ignores

Events. Conjunctures. Longue durée. Braudel saw history operating at three speeds simultaneously. Most organizations are trapped in one—reacting to surface happenings while deeper patterns go unnoticed.

Discovery series

Ripeness: Why Timing Matters More Than Tactics

Some conflicts resist resolution for years, then suddenly yield. What changed wasn't strategy—it was timing. Zartman's ripeness theory suggests that it matters more than how.

Discovery series

Student Syndrome: The Temporal Pathology Hiding in Your Project Plans

Give a task generous buffers, and work still compresses to the deadline. Goldratt called it Student Syndrome—one of several patterns that reliably sabotage timelines regardless of how much safety is built in.

Discovery series

Getting Inside the Loop: Tempo as Competitive Advantage

In aerial combat, the faster pilot doesn't always win. The pilot who thinks faster does. Boyd's OODA loop reveals why decision cycle speed—not just decision quality—determines who controls the game.

Discovery series

Takt Time: The Rhythm That Connects Work to Demand

Toyota built a philosophy around one question: What if work moved at exactly the pace customers need it? Takt time makes the invisible visible—the relationship between effort and value in real time.

Discovery series

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.

Discovery series

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.

Discovery series

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.

Discovery series

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?

Discovery series

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.

Discovery series

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.

Discovery series

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