Choose the Clocks
Every leadership team is under pressure to move faster. But faster than what? The environment doesn't have one speed — it has clocks. The first discipline of Requisite Pace is choosing which ones you will couple to.
Mark Lancelott
Requisite Pace, Operating Model, Organisation Design, Strategy, Adaptability, Leadership, Business Design
Choose the Clocks
Blog 2 in the Requisite Pace series
Every leadership team I work with is under pressure to move faster.
The question they rarely stop to ask is:
Faster than what?
The assumption is that speed is single-dimensional—that the organisation has one speed, the environment has one speed, and the job is to close the gap.
But the environment doesn't have one speed.
It has clocks.
Technology moves on one. Regulation on another. Customer expectations, competitor behaviour, capital markets, talent—each on its own rhythm. They don't tick in sync, and they never have.
Trying to keep up with all of them is how organisations exhaust themselves.
The first discipline: choose what you keep up with
In the first post, I argued that most organisations don't have a speed problem. They have a changing-gears problem—different parts running at different speeds, with nobody designing the interfaces between them.
That leads to four questions:
Which external clock speeds matter most?
What pace profile do we need?
Where are the friction points?
Could we change gear in time?
This post takes the first step underneath those questions.
Before you design your internal pace, you have to decide which parts of the world you are willing to keep up with.
That is the first discipline of Requisite Pace:
Choose the clocks you will couple to.
Everything else follows from that choice.
From strategy to pace architecture
Strategy is usually described as a choice about markets, customers, and advantage.
It is also, more quietly, a choice about attention.
Where to play is a decision about which parts of the world matter
How to win is a decision about how you respond
What's usually left implicit is:
At what speed do those parts of the world move—and can we keep up?
Answering that question is what I call designing your pace architecture—the timing, rhythm, and coupling through which the organisation senses, decides, and changes.
This is where Requisite Pace adds something different.
Frameworks like Three Horizons help you decide which futures matter.
Requisite Pace asks a different question:
Which forces are shaping those futures—and what are their clocks?
Because those forces don't move at the same speed.
AI capability shifts in weeks and months
Regulatory regimes evolve over years—until they suddenly compress
Customer expectations may drift for a decade, then tip in a season
Capital cycles turn over years, but sentiment can flip in days
If your organisation senses all of these on the same cadence—say, quarterly—you are not aligned.
You are blind in different ways.
The discipline of selective coupling
Most organisations have never consciously chosen their clocks.
They have inherited them.
For much of economic history, that made sense. Many organisational rhythms were tied—directly or indirectly—to natural cycles: the orbit of the moon (monthly), the orbit of the earth (annual), the seasons that governed agriculture, production, and trade.
Those cadences shaped accounting cycles, planning rhythms, and governance habits that still echo today.
But for most modern organisations, those rhythms are no longer the ones that matter.
Technology, markets, and risk now move on very different clocks—often faster, often uneven, and often decoupled from those natural cycles.
Yet many organisations are still governed as if they weren't.
reporting cycles remain quarterly
planning cycles annual
governance rhythms inherited rather than designed
The result is an organisation that is:
over-attentive to some drivers (often financial)
under-attentive to others (often structural or emerging)
and rarely aligned with the futures it claims to pursue
The first discipline is therefore not acceleration. It is selection.
Which external drivers genuinely determine our future performance?
Which do we need to sense frequently?
Which require slower, more deliberate attention?
Which do we deliberately not attend to?
This is a strategic act of selective coupling.
You are deciding which clocks you will synchronise with—and which you will not.
For some drivers, the honest answer will be:
We cannot currently keep up.
That is not a failure. It is a design constraint.
Slow is not the enemy
There is an assumption embedded in much of the current conversation about organisations:
Fast is good. Slow is bad.
It is wrong.
But the correction is not that slow is inherently virtuous.
It is that tempo must be appropriate to the work.
Some things should be fast:
customer response
incident detection
short-cycle operational decisions
Some things should be slower and more deliberate:
regulatory interpretation
capital allocation
architectural evolution
major governance decisions
Even here, "slow" is relative.
Architectural evolution, for example, often needs to move faster than it currently does—but it will still need to run on a slower cadence than product or solution decisions.
The question is not absolute speed. It is relative speed and fit.
This is where Requisite Pace departs from agile and its scaled descendants.
Those frameworks ask: how do we go faster?
Requisite Pace asks something harder:
Which things need to be faster, which need to be slower—and how do they work together without one destabilising the other?
An organisation that treats all delay as failure is not fast.
It is brittle.
Two failure modes
When organisations don't choose their clocks deliberately, two patterns show up.
1. Pace mismatch
The organisation is attending to the right drivers—but its sensing cycle is too slow.
Signals arrive. By the time they are understood and acted on, the world has moved.
real-time market signals, annual decision cycles
rapid technology shifts, fixed hiring and funding cycles
The organisation is always behind.
2. Signal overload
The organisation is attending to too many drivers at once.
Signals flood in faster than they can be interpreted. Leadership becomes an aggregator of noise. The organisation thrashes.
More signal does not create more understanding.
Past a point, it creates less.
Both failures come from the same root:
A failure to choose what to attend to, how often to attend to it, and at what resolution.
The measure: Mean Time to Know (MTTK)
Lens 1 introduces a simple but powerful measure:
Mean Time to Know (MTTK)
For each driver you are coupled to:
How quickly do you need to know?
How quickly do you actually know?
The gap between those two is where risk lives.
MTTK is not a single number. It is a profile:
fast for some drivers
slow for others
and often misaligned with what each driver actually requires
Most organisations overestimate how fast they know—especially for signals that don't fit their existing reporting rhythms.
The two-way relationship
There is a deeper implication.
So far, the argument runs one way:
Strategy → chosen futures → chosen clocks → sensing design
But the arrow also runs in reverse.
Your current pace architecture determines what strategy you are even capable of seeing.
If your sensing operates quarterly:
sub-quarter opportunities don't just go unexploited
they are invisible
If your decisions are tied to annual cycles:
strategies requiring mid-year reallocation never form
This is the adjacent possible.
The futures your organisation can pursue are constrained by the clocks it is already coupled to.
A strategy that depends on signals you cannot sense at the required pace is not a strategy.
It is an aspiration.
What this looks like in practice
Choosing the clocks is not abstract. It shows up in what the organisation is made of.
If you are genuinely coupled to a fast-moving driver:
it appears in leadership attention and calendar time
in hiring decisions and external networks
in partnerships with organisations closer to the shift
in pilots designed to generate signal, not just deliver outcomes
in roles whose job is to interpret and translate
Different clocks produce different organisational shapes.
coupling to regulation changes governance cadence and board engagement
coupling to talent markets changes how leaders show up externally
coupling to technology shifts changes how you invest in learning and partnerships
The clocks you are coupled to are not what you say.
They are what your time, money, and attention reveal.
The diagnostic conversation
A Lens 1 conversation is simple—and uncomfortable.
Which external drivers are we currently attuned to?
Which actually determine our future performance?
Which are residue from an earlier strategy?
For the drivers that matter, how fast do we need to know—and how fast do we actually know?
Most leadership teams discover two things very quickly:
they are paying close attention to things that no longer matter
and not nearly enough attention to things that do
Where this leads
Choosing the clocks sets the problem.
The next step is what most organisations struggle with:
How do you translate multiple external clocks into coherent internal action?
That is Lens 2: Design the Gears—and where most organisations accumulate what I call pace debt.
A final question
If you had to list, deliberately, the external drivers your organisation is currently attuned to—ranked by how much they determine your performance—
could you do it?
and would your leadership team agree?
If the answer is no, you haven't chosen your clocks.
You've inherited them.
And that means your organisation is being timed by forces you don't control.
Speed isn't the issue. Timing is.