The Three Durations: Seeing the Timescales Your Organization Ignores

Most organizations are trapped in one kind of time.

They react to events. This meeting, that crisis, today's metrics, yesterday's email. The surface of organizational life is dense with happenings, and attention flows there by default.

Beneath the events, slower patterns move. Market cycles. Strategic initiatives. Leadership tenures. These unfold over months and years, harder to see from inside the daily churn.

And beneath those, something slower still. Culture. Identity. The assumptions so deep they've become invisible. These shift over decades—if they shift at all.

The French historian Fernand Braudel built an entire approach to history around this observation. He called them the three durations, and he argued that understanding any complex system requires seeing all three at once.

Braudel's Framework

Braudel was part of the Annales School, a group of historians who rejected the traditional focus on political events—kings, battles, treaties—in favor of deeper structures. His masterwork, The Mediterranean, analyzed civilization at multiple timescales simultaneously.

He identified three distinct temporal layers:

Événements (Events): The surface layer. Days, weeks, moments. Political happenings, individual actions, specific decisions. Braudel called this "surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs." Events are visible, dramatic, and—in his view—often superficial. They're what newspapers report.

Conjunctures: The middle layer. Decades to centuries. Economic cycles, social movements, demographic shifts. These are patterns that individuals experience but don't control. A recession, a technological wave, a generational attitude shift. Conjunctures are the medium-term forces that shape what's possible in any given moment.

Longue durée: The deep layer. Centuries to millennia. Geography, climate, mental structures, persistent cultural patterns. These are "almost timeless"—changing so slowly they appear static from within a human lifetime. The longue durée sets the boundaries within which everything else moves.

Braudel's argument: to understand any historical moment, you must understand all three durations simultaneously. Events make no sense without conjunctures; conjunctures make no sense without the longue durée.

The Organizational Translation

Braudel was analyzing civilizations, but the framework maps surprisingly well to organizational life:

Events (days to weeks): The daily operations. Meetings, decisions, communications, tasks completed and tasks deferred. Most organizational attention lives here. It's where firefighting happens, where performance is visible, where praise and blame land.

Conjunctures (months to years): The strategic cycles. Market positions, competitive dynamics, technology platforms, leadership regimes. These are the forces that shape what the organization can accomplish in any given period. A strategic initiative operates at this timescale. So does a cultural shift, a product lifecycle, a funding environment.

Longue durée (years to decades): The organizational DNA. Founding assumptions, industry identity, embedded mental models about how things work. These are the deep patterns that persist across leadership changes, strategic pivots, even near-death experiences. They're usually invisible to people inside the organization—like water to fish.

What We're Observing

When we look at organizations through Braudel's lens, certain patterns become visible:

Event fixation. Most organizational attention concentrates on événements. Daily standups, weekly reports, monthly reviews—the rhythms of organizational life are calibrated to surface happenings. Events are urgent, visible, and feel controllable. The deeper layers require different kinds of attention that the event layer crowds out.

Strategic blindness. Organizations often struggle to operate at the conjuncture level. Strategic planning attempts it, but strategic plans are frequently overwhelmed by events. The plan sits in a drawer while daily reality absorbs all bandwidth. Conjunctures unfold whether or not you're watching them.

Cultural invisibility. The longue durée is almost entirely invisible from inside. Ask people to describe their organizational culture and they'll describe events ("we have all-hands meetings") or perhaps conjunctures ("we're going through a transformation"). The deep patterns—the assumptions about how organizations work, what counts as legitimate, what's unthinkable—are too close to see.

Timescale collision. Problems arise when responses are calibrated to the wrong duration. An event-level solution to a conjuncture-level problem will fail. A conjuncture-level initiative against longue durée patterns will stall. Part of organizational dysfunction is misaligned timescales—fighting the wrong temporal layer.

The Diagnostic Questions

Braudel's framework suggests a set of questions organizations rarely ask:

At the event level: What's happening right now? What decisions need to be made? What crises need attention? (Organizations usually ask these.)

At the conjuncture level: What cycles are we in? What medium-term patterns are shaping our possibilities? What strategic forces are at work? What phase of what longer wave? (Organizations sometimes ask these, usually in annual planning.)

At the longue durée level: What assumptions are so deep we don't notice them? What about our industry, our identity, our mental models would be strange to an outsider? What constraints feel like physics but are actually culture? (Organizations almost never ask these.)

The integrative question: How do the three levels interact in this situation? Is this event meaningful because it signals a conjuncture shift? Is this strategic initiative fighting the longue durée? Is what looks like an event actually a symptom of something deeper?

The Temporal Discipline

Braudel's insight isn't just analytical—it's about attention allocation.

Organizations that attend only to events become reactive. They're tossed by every happening, unable to see patterns, surprised by shifts that were visible at longer timescales.

Organizations that attend only to strategy miss execution. Grand plans fail because the daily reality they assumed isn't the daily reality they get.

Organizations that never examine the longue durée remain unconscious of the patterns they're living within—until those patterns meet a world that no longer accommodates them.

The discipline is holding all three in view simultaneously. Not abandoning events for strategy, not dismissing strategy for deep culture work. Seeing how they interact.

What to Look For

In your own context, you might observe:

• Where organizational attention concentrates—events, conjunctures, or the longue durée
• What timescale problems are being addressed at (and whether it matches the timescale at which the problem exists)
• Which conjunctures the organization is in—economic cycles, technology waves, generational shifts
• What longue durée assumptions are operating—the things too deep to notice without deliberate effort
• When event-level noise is obscuring conjuncture-level signals
• When strategic initiatives are fighting cultural patterns that will outlast them

The question Braudel asks isn't "what's happening?" It's "what's happening at each timescale, and how do they relate?"

That's a different kind of temporal awareness—and a different kind of organizational intelligence.

Temporacy is investigating the hidden temporal structures that shape organizational life. Braudel's three durations offer one lens for seeing what's usually invisible: the multiple timescales operating simultaneously in any system. We're exploring what this means for organizations trying to understand where they are in time.