The Territory I Find Myself Exploring

A personal note on the questions behind my work on operating models, AI, sustainability and organisational adaptation.

Over the last year, a number of people have asked variations of the same question.

What exactly are you working on?

It is a reasonable question. Depending on when we last spoke, I might have been talking about operating models, organisation design, sustainability, circularity, AI, value chains, hierarchy, systems thinking, or something called Requisite Pace. From a distance, it can look like a collection of adjacent interests rather than a coherent body of work.

The truth is that I increasingly think they are all aspects of the same question.

I am interested in how organisations create value, how they adapt when the world changes, and why so many struggle to do both at the same time.

That question has pulled me into several different disciplines. Strategy helps explain where value comes from. Operating model design helps explain how value is delivered. Organisation design helps explain how work is coordinated and decisions are made. Sustainability introduces the challenge of balancing short and long horizons. AI raises questions about what happens when parts of an organisation suddenly become much faster than the rest.

What has surprised me is that the deeper I go, the more all of these conversations seem to converge on a common theme.

Time.

Not time as scheduling or productivity. Time as a design variable.

Most of our management tools are concerned with structure. We design reporting lines, accountabilities, governance, capabilities, processes and operating models. We ask what should be centralised and decentralised, combined and separated, standardised and differentiated.

These questions matter.

But increasingly I find myself noticing that organisations often fail not because their structures are obviously wrong, but because the timing requirements of different parts have drifted apart.

A market moves weekly while governance operates quarterly.

A new AI capability compresses analysis from days to minutes while decision-making remains unchanged.

A sustainability challenge unfolds over decades while incentives resolve annually.

An operational team learns continuously while strategy is refreshed once a year.

In each case, the issue is not simply that something is too slow. It is that different parts of the organisation are operating to different clocks, and the organisation has few ways of seeing or managing the resulting tensions.

This observation first emerged through work on Requisite Pace, the idea that organisations need to operate at a pace appropriate to the environments they face. But the further I have explored the subject, the less I think the real issue is pace itself.

Pace is a symptom.

The deeper question is where organisational timing comes from in the first place.

That has led me back to value.

Every organisation exists to create value. But value is not created in a single moment. It is created through recurring cycles.

A retailer must sense demand, replenish stock and fulfil orders.

A software company releases, learns, improves and releases again.

A pharmaceutical company discovers, develops, tests, launches and monitors.

A circular business recovers, reuses and regenerates resources over extended periods.

These are not just processes. They are value cycles. They are recurring loops through which value is created, delivered, renewed and captured.

What increasingly interests me is that value cycles carry temporal requirements.

Some require rapid sensing and response. Others require long-term commitment and patience. Most organisations operate several value cycles simultaneously, each with its own rhythm and horizon.

Yet organisation design has relatively little to say about how these different rhythms should coexist.

How should a fast-moving customer cycle interact with a slower investment cycle?

How should operational decisions relate to strategic decisions made on entirely different horizons?

How should organisations reconcile ecological cycles measured in decades with commercial cycles measured in quarters?

How should governance adapt when AI dramatically accelerates one part of a value cycle but not another?

These questions sit at the intersection of everything I have been writing about recently. The operating model work is about how value is organised. The sustainability work is about how short and long cycles interact. The AI work is about what happens when some organisational clocks suddenly speed up. The organisation design work is about how authority, coordination and decision-making cope with different tempos. The Requisite Pace work is about the consequences when those rhythms fall out of step.

Different perspectives, increasingly, on the same territory.

I do not yet have a finished theory. In fact, one of the pleasures of this stage is not knowing exactly where the exploration will end.

What I do have is a growing conviction that organisation design has paid far more attention to the structural requirements of value creation than to its temporal requirements.

We know a great deal about how to organise work.

We know much less about how to organise time.

That is the territory I find myself exploring.

Future articles will continue to range across operating models, organisation design, AI, sustainability, systems thinking and value creation. But they are increasingly connected by a common question:

What if time is not simply something organisations operate within, but something they need to design?