Time and Professor Parkinson

All through my working life, I’ve noticed that colleagues will complain about the lack of time to do a job properly.

It’s not a view I share. If you have a month to plan something, it’s nearly always too long, leading to over-complication, muddle and prevarication. If you have twenty minutes, you’ll get to it urgently.

I’ve long been an adherent of Professor Parkinson’s brilliant “law”:

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. 

And I love the composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein’s spin on the subject:

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan and not quite enough time.

Exactly!

The relativity of time

 

I don’t know that Einstein was aware that time is also relative to culture.

In Germany, a 9:00am meeting will start at 8:55. In England at 9:10. In France at 9:15 and in Italy at 9:20. In Brazil it will be 9:45 or 9:50. Uniquely, in my experience, the meeting starts at 9 o’clock sharp in the Netherlands.

All of these are in reality on-time meetings. So getting upset when “my time” isn’t happening often means that you’re working with foreigners.

Running a workshop in Sao Paolo, the German client came to me on day two to apologise for the tardiness of her Brazilian colleagues. “I’m sure they will be here on time,” I responded. And they were.

The tyranny of time

Just occasionally I stumble across essay-writing that thrills me.

This is part of a piece* in a recent issue of Philosophy Now by Professor Raymond Tallis on the nature of time:

“So, while we are pulling time out of the jaws of physics, we must not forget what an amazing, and deeply puzzling, activity ‘timing’ is. And its consequences are immeasurable. It transforms social life into a multitude of intermeshing ensembles harmonised by timepieces. We watch time and time watches us; and the portability of the watch compared with, say, the obelisk, locks together the watching and the watched more intimately. Inside these ever more tightly drawn temporal meshes, the clock rules our every moment. The living rhythms spelt out in our breathing, our walking and our beating hearts, are overridden by something totally different, symbolised by the way the watch we consult with fast-beating heart clasps our wrist, seeming to strangle our pulse. We dance to a rhythm of the shared day, of the common world, of the universe, that’s imposed and embraced: it is ours and not ours.

“This is not all bad, of course. Our lives are vastly enriched by keeping track of the time, and we are collectively and individually empowered by co-ordination: dancing to the music of clock time, we can work together more effectively to meet and anticipate our basic needs, to generate ever more complex ways of exploiting nature, and to erect defences against a universe that has no particular care for us. And wemust not underestimate what an extraordinary achievement this is.”

In recent years I’ve dispensed with watches (and my mobile phone is usually switched off). So I rely more and more on my sense of what time it is. It works for me.

*http://www.philosophynow.org/issues/90/A_Hasty_Report_From_A_Tearing_Hurry

Innovation Process as the Grand National

As organisations have struggled to systematise and professionalise their Innovation Process, so the course seems to have got longer and longer, with more and more jumps, many of them high and with boggy ground around them.

Sometimes the resulting course looks quite short, but the reality can be very different. A senior R&D manager in one company that I worked with told me that their Innovation Process has four decision gates, but he worked out that, on one particular project which eventually reached the market place, there had been in total over 160 decision points.

No wonder new ideas can take so long to get to market, often being dramatically sub-optimised on the journey (the death of a thousand cuts), and allowing competitors to get in there first. And so many good ideas can and do fall at any one of the jumps.

How does your organisation's process work?