introduction

Timing matters. And it matters in every aspect of business: from the launch of a new product to decisions about when to change strategic direction, spin off part of a company, accept a counteroffer, or invest in new equipment. History is full of innovative products and services that failed because they were too early. The market wasn't ready. The technology had too many bugs. Supporting infrastructure didn't exist. More commonly, in a world racing on steroids, the fatal flaw is being late. We should have moved more quickly. Our strategy would have worked, if only we had executed earlier. Unfortunately, as Homer said, it is the height of folly to be wise too late.

I've written When for executives in all fields and for people at every level of an organization where it is important to get the timing right. Most individuals and organizations already have some way of taking timing into account. For the individual, it may be to rely on the feeling in your gut or on what you have done in the past; for the organization, there may be a formal planning process or sophisticated models or algorithms. Whatever the approach, timing errors are common.

Some timing issues are easily identified. We know about them in advance: When is the right time to launch a product or a new business, for example? Is it too early or too late? When will a window of opportunity open, and when will it close? What time-related risks am I running? Will my industry change overnight? How should I proceed: incrementally with caution or as quickly as possible? But some timing issues are not so easy to identify, and missing them can have tragic consequences. Suppose, for example, that your job was to oversee the launch of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada. Clearly, the key issue, as far as timing was concerned, would be to make sure that the venues were ready and that all construction was completed in time for the games to begin. To do that, you would employ the sophisticated tools of project management. Your focus would be on logistics and scheduling. If things were running late, you would look for ways to speed them up, and so on. The last thing you would be prepared for would be a tragic accident just before the opening ceremony. And, yet, that is what happened when twenty-one-year-old Georgian Nodar Kumaritashvili died in a high-speed crash on the luge during his final training run. Could you—or should you—have seen this catastrophe coming? An accident is terrible whenever it occurs, but the timing of a fatal accident, just at the start of the games, could not have been worse.

If you were to look back to see how timing contributed to this accident, here is what you would see:

• There would be training runs before the start of the Olympics; in short, there was a known sequence, first training, then the real thing.
• The highest speeds on the track would occur at the end of training and right before the official start of the games; in short, you could predict how individuals training for speed events would increase their rate of speed. They wouldn't go all out in the beginning, while they are still learning the track.
• There was a clear demarcation between the end of training runs and the official start of the games—that is, a clear punctuation mark, with little time (a short interval) between them.
• Beginning and endings have special emotions associated with them. An accident at the beginning casts a pall over everything that follows; an accident at the end remains in memory and darkens what came before, no matter how positive. So we know when the timing of a fatal accident would be most distressing.
• Why was the track so dangerous? In part, because the site on which it was built—selected to be a commercial success once the games were over—happened to have a topography that made for a particularly steep and twisting track. So part of the reason the track was dangerous was the result of planning that took into account its future use. There were two windows of opportunity, one during the games and one after. The latter increased the risks associated with the former.
• Finally, all these factors came together to create a condition of synchronous risk, the risk that two actions or events (the greatest speed on the track and the beginning of the games) would occur in close proximity with potentially serious consequences.

Would you have been in a position to highlight events that posed this kind of timing risk, and asked those building the venues to double down on safety? Or would the elements and clues you needed to arrive at that decision remain in the background, not something you were looking for or paying attention to? One objective of this book is to help you surface these kinds of timing risks in advance while there is still time to do something about them.

WHY DOES TIMING ELUDE US?

We miss timing issues, or make wrong decisions about them, not simply because our world is complex and uncertain, but because the way we describe the world and the tasks we must accomplish omit the kinds of facts we need. I call these fragmentary descriptions time impoverished because they fail to include all the sequences, rates, shapes, punctuation marks, intervals, leads, lags, overlaps, and other time-related characteristics that are part of the temporal structure of everything that happens, every action that is taken, every plan that is implemented.

It is not simply that we fail to include these time-based characteristics when we plan events. We routinely omit them from our everyday thinking. Consider the familiar concept of incentives in business. We normally ask whether all parties have the same incentives, whether they are the right ones, and whether they are powerful enough to produce the desired outcome. From a timing perspective, however, that is not enough. We also need to know whether all the relevant incentives will be present at the same time. When different incentives are present, which will dominate? Will one fade, just as another surfaces? It is not enough to blame a bad outcome on the wrong incentives. We need to know why those incentives became important at that particular time.

When I explain the concept of time-impoverished description to a college audience, the example I use is a kiss. I tell students that a kiss that lasts a fraction of a second is a peck; one that lasts a minute is a proposition; and one that lasts five minutes is an act of resuscitation. In short, we need to know how long a kiss lasts in order to know what it means. Similarly, a hug, if executed with less intensity but longer duration, is no longer a hug, but holding, the purpose of which may be constraint. Time, therefore, is not a container for our actions, but a constituent of them. Everything that happens in the world happens in a particular order, takes a certain amount of time, begins or ends at a specific moment, and so on. When these characteristics are left unspecified, we can easily miss or misread what is going on.

What I like to say is that you can't solve for t if T is not in the equation. You can't time events and decide when to act, or even know what someone else's action means, if your understanding of the world omits the Totality of time-relevant characteristics (sequences, rates, duration, beginnings, endings, and so on) on which timing depends. If you don't look for and note these temporal characteristics, you won't have the information you need to make good decisions about timing.

There are many reasons why our descriptions and explanations of the world tend to be time impoverished. First, as real estate agents are fond of telling us, location is everything. Our own location in time is described by a single word: now. Now is where we live, our immediate and concrete reality. We can't live in the past, except metaphorically, or in the future, except in our imagination. Although we are told to remember the lessons of history and to think long term, we will always remain closely tethered to the present moment. Now is the only place in time where we are truly alive.

Another source of our myopia, ironically, is the power of vision. We focus on what we can see. As a result, we forget to take time, which is invisible, into account. Consider the design of the human hand. Our thumbs are opposable—positioned opposite four other fingers—which makes it possible to grasp and hold objects. That makes the hand extremely useful. But what is missing from every account of the opposable thumb I have read is the need for synchronization. The thumb and the fingers must arrive at the same point at the same time. If the thumb had to wait minutes for the other fingers to arrive, or vice versa, a lot would slip through our fingers. The human hand would not function as the superb tool that it is. A spatial arrangement gets the credit, but timing does the work!

Another reason we miss the information we need to make timing decisions, besides the tendency to focus on what we can see, has to do with what our brain can and can't do.

A simple thought experiment illustrates what I mean. Imagine inserting a key into your front door. Do you have that image clearly in mind? Fine. Now notice what you omitted. You left out all the steps along the path from where you are reading this book to your front door. As you skipped over them, your brain did not remind you that these steps were being left out—that you had to walk out of a building and drive your car through heavy traffic to get there, for example. No warning bell went off. Nor did your mind fast-forward though a detailed film that included all those steps. You simply imagined inserting the key into the lock. Neuroscience calls this phenomenon time travel. I like to think of it as the brain's quantum, or Q, capacity. We are not only able to think about the distant past or future but also able to do so without imagining the path through time needed to get there. The fact that we can bypass all intermediate steps is an enormous advantage. We could not survive as a species without this Q capacity. We'd be paralyzed—slowed down by a brain that would take an hour to think about any action requiring an hour to accomplish. The result is a paradox of competence. What our brain does well is also part of the reason we fare poorly when it comes to making decisions about timing. Our ability to jump from one point in time to another makes it easy to miss sequences, intervals, pauses, and other temporal elements that truly matter.¹

There is another feature of our brain that makes it difficult to get the information we need to make good timing decisions. In this case, I'm not talking about what we our brain does with ease, but what it cannot do, which is to image and explore the patterns that form when many actions and events go on at the same time. I call this limitation Copland's Constraint, after the composer Aaron Copland, who pointed out that when we listen to music, it is difficult to listen to more than four melodies at once. With four or five melodies playing at the same time, the composition becomes a blur of sound. Its internal pattern of organization is lost. The same happens with events. At any given moment, there are hundreds of thousands of events and processes going on at the same time. We can easily miss the patterns they form. To anticipate the risk of a perfect storm, for example, we would need to monitor and make sense of large numbers of synchronous processes, sequences, actions, and events. That is not something we can do in our head. In a sense, we are poorly adapted to our environment. We are serial creatures: when we speak, we say one word after another; when we walk, we place one foot in front of the next; when we plan or reason, we think about what follows what. But we live in a massively parallel world. As a result, we miss many of the future implications of all the events that are happening now because we lack the peripheral vision to encompass and understand them.

These two characteristics, the brain's Q capacity and Copland's Constraint, mean that it is easy to miss the information we need for deciding questions of timing. It should therefore come as no surprise that mathematical models that take time-impoverished descriptions of the world as their input, won't—indeed, can't—tell us when bubbles will form or when we will face a liquidity crisis or what the devastating effects of perfect storm may be. The information (T) that we need to anticipate such conditions isn't in the models.

That is equally true of the stories we read or hear in the news. Every article we read online or hear on the radio will be incomplete. It will omit information about the temporal characteristics that are needed to understand why events happened when they did, and what we can expect in the future. The reason these stories omit information we need—the enormity of what is left out will become apparent by the end of this book—is not a lack of space or faulty editorial judgment. The problem is that all the temporal characteristics that influence the timing of events never entered the mind of the reporter who wrote the story, the editor who reviewed it, or the reader who read it. We often talk about systemic risk, connecting the dots. But before we can connect the dots, we need to find them. As we saw in the case of the fatal accident at the 2010 Winter Olympics, this is not easy. The solution therefore is not data mining, bringing millions of scattered bits and pieces of information together, and then connecting the dots. No matter how large the database or how sophisticated the search algorithms, one cannot retrieve what has not been deposited.

When we include all the intervals, rhythms, sequences, and so on that are associated with real-world events, we will find ourselves better able to predict not only what might happen but when. The Arab Spring provides an example of what a “time-rich” description can look like. As you recall, the start of the Arab Spring, which now seems so long ago, began when a street peddler in Tunisia was humiliated by police and set himself on fire. His death led to protests that forced the resignation of Tunisia's president. At that point, the question on everyone's mind was, What would happen next? Would protests spread to Egypt? No one knew. To see how timing is involved, let's look at the chronology of events.

Fall 2010—Parliamentary elections were held Egypt. These elections were widely viewed as fraudulent.

December 17—A Tunisian peddler, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire, and on December 18, protests began in his hometown.

January 4, 2011—Bouazizi died in a hospital shortly after receiving a visit by Tunisia's president that was deemed too little, too late. Violent protests broke out due to public outrage over Bouazizi's death as well as the high unemployment that continued to surge.

January 14—Protests forced Tunisia's President Ben Ali from office.

January 25—Demonstrations in Egypt, planned months in advance to protest police brutality, began and quickly escalated.

February 11—Egypt's President Mubarak was forced to resign.

To underscore how the timing of the events contributed to Mubarak's resignation, let's change them. First, let's assume that the events in Tunisia occurred five months later than they did. That adjustment would have two consequences. First, it would distance them from the mid-autumn elections in Egypt. Anger can more easily build when the instigating events are close in time. Second, it would also put them after January 25, the date demonstrations were planned to protest police brutality. That would mean that the protesters on January 25 wouldn't be able to use Tunisia as a model because the events in Tunisia had not yet occurred.

Next, let's keep the chronology intact, but assume that there had been no day set aside to protest police brutality. Tension might rise in Egypt following the events in Tunisia, but it would have no planned point of release. Protests are more likely to erupt when there is a single point in time where they can be concentrated. (Pressure = Force/Area, for those who remember their high school physics.)

Finally, let's assume that the protests in Tunisia had a different trajectory. Instead of building quickly and leading immediately to the ouster of President Ben Ali, they grew slowly, and it took months rather than weeks to force him from office. As a general rule, physical causes are perceived as more potent when their effects are immediate. So, too, for human actions. Individuals experience a sense of efficacy when they achieve a difficult objective quickly. So, what made the events in Tunisia a powerful model to be imitated was not simply what the Tunisian protesters achieved but the speed with which they achieved it.

Change the timing of events, and Mubarak might still be in power. We can't know, of course. Demonstrations might still have forced him out. But when we include these temporal elements—the time-shape of the protests, how quickly they emerged and grew, the date of a planned protest against the police, its location relative to other events, and so on—we gain a much better understanding of what happened and when. Include them in our thinking and monitor them in real time, and we will be better prepared for what the future holds. Our assessment of risk will be more accurate.

GETTING BEYOND THE USUAL SUSPECTS

I've noticed that when I mention I've written a book on timing, people make a number of assumptions. So it's important to tell you what this book is not about. At the end of the film Casablanca, the chief of police turns to a subordinate and utters the now famous line: “Round up the usual suspects.” Here are the usual suspects. This book is not about any of them.

It's not about speed, strictly, or how to be fast and flexible—the personal and organizational capacity to turn on a dime. It is not about efficiency, how to do more in less time. This is not a book on timing the stock market; I won't tell you when to buy or sell. It's not a book about not having enough time to do what we need to do. It's not about setting priorities. It's not about time management or project management or about becoming better organized. It is not intended to help you streamline operations, for example, to make sure that the right part or resource is available just when it is needed. Nor will I discuss scenario planning, trend analysis, or how to predict the future. In short, it is not about the usual suspects.

Instead, it will develop your ability to manage four critical timing-related issues. All groups and organizations face them. We also routinely confront them in our personal and professional lives. They are

1. Knowing when to act
2. Managing timing risk
3. Discovering that timing matters
4. Choosing the right temporal design

Let's look at each of these in turn.

Knowing When to Act

The first issue can be summarized in a one-word question, When? When is the right time to launch a new product, enter or exit a market, acquire another firm, restructure one's organization, invest in new technology, or implement or deviate from a strategic plan? When is the right time to act?²

Conductor Leonard Bernstein describes what it feels like when the moment is right:

Bernstein gets the timing right because he is acutely aware of a temporal pattern—in this case, the rise in tension associated with beginning a concert, an increase in tension that demands release at exactly the right moment.

For many executives, the conventional response to the question of timing is speed—taking swift action in order to beat the competition. Being first is usually considered to be advantageous—and it is if

• The image of being a pioneer is important.
• Learning and experience are important and will be difficult to imitate.
• Customer loyalty matters. Once customers have made a choice, they may not pay attention to or be interested in alternatives.
• You can preempt scarce resources or completely occupy a market niche.
• Starting early means that you can develop a track record with suppliers and distributors that will secure cost advantages or priority treatment.
• Early, large, and irreversible commitments will deter others from entering the same market.
• Buyer switching costs are high. Once a firm has invested in adapting to a seller's product, that firm can become locked in.
• Being first ends the game—that is, there is mutual agreement among competitors that whoever first secures the prize removes it from competition because to continue the fight would damage everyone.⁴

Yet waiting for someone else to be first can be the better strategy if

• You can catch up. A firm may have special strengths in manufacturing, marketing, or distribution that make it possible to recover lost ground quickly. It can afford to let other firms educate the customers and make the mistakes, and then quickly imitate what works.
• There is a high degree of market uncertainty. Sometimes it is wise to wait until standards emerge and risks are clarified. An early mover may build the wrong skills, invest in the wrong technology, and face high costs of replacing them as circumstances change.

Being first is a disadvantage, as well, if others aren't ready to follow your lead. The most dramatic example I know occurred in the Soviet Union around the time of the Great Purge. At the end of a Communist Party conference, a tribute to Stalin was announced. Everyone rose to his feet and promptly erupted into applause. The clapping continued for several minutes. As the seconds ticked by, the mood became slightly tentative and then somewhat strained. Who would be the first to stop clapping? Not the secretary on the podium—his predecessor had recently been arrested, and the secret police were present at this event. Finally, after eleven minutes, the director of a paper factory, among those on the platform, was the first to stop his applause and take his seat. Relieved, the crowd followed his lead. That night, the man was arrested. After being told by his interrogator to “never be the first to stop applauding,” he was given ten years in prison.⁵

This story is darkly amusing—in part because it happened a long time ago and didn't happen to us. But it does underline the point: first is not always best, and “When?” is not an easy question to answer.

Managing Timing Risk

The second timing issue is risk. We inevitably run into timing risks that we did not anticipate—and wish we had, as was the case at the 2010 Olympics. Financial writer Mark Ingebretsen, in his book Why Companies Fail, describes a typical example. A major U.S. food producer built a pineapple-processing facility located upstream from where the pineapples actually grew. When it was time to harvest the pineapples, a barge was to carry them to the cannery. Unfortunately, at that time of year, the river current was so strong that the barge couldn't make it. I wasn't present when the company's profits floated away with the rushing river. But it is not hard to imagine the scene: angry voices, finger-pointing, perhaps someone's job threatened. Understandable, and perhaps fair. The people in charge should have known. Their mistake was not taking timing into account.⁶

When we think about risk, we usually think about type: What kind of risk am I facing? Will new competitors enter the market niche I currently dominate? Will new legislation limit my ability to innovate? Will new advances in science and technology make my products or services obsolete? Then we think about magnitude: How serious is this risk? What would happen if it materialized? But there is another consideration—namely, timing: When might a risk, such as the risk of a perfect storm, materialize, and how much advance warning will I have?

Discovering That Timing Matters

Steven Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, was asked in 2009 what he considered the most challenging part of his job. What made him frustrated, he said, was “when progress runs up against issues that should have been anticipated, or that simply couldn't have been foreseen.”⁷

Not all timing issues are obvious. For example, perhaps you knew that you needed to make decisions about hiring or firing, but you didn't realize that the window for making them was rapidly closing. You might be concerned about how competitors would respond to your new product line, but you didn't think through how the timing of their response would affect your marketing plan. You might know in your gut that the project you are leading will take longer than planned for, but you didn't realize what you needed to do immediately to protect your people and resources from the consequences of a delay. In any complex business, there are a host of timing issues that you need to be aware of. This book will help you surface them so that you are not blindsided when they arise.

Choosing the Right Temporal Design

Sometimes it is possible to take a single action at a single point in time. A colleague resigns suddenly from a technical position that requires specific skills and training; you need someone to step in promptly to fill the slot. Therefore, you immediately hire the one person in your trusted network who has the right experience.

More often, we pursue a time-extended course of action. In order to ensure proper succession planning, a board of directors and the current CEO may spend several years considering suitable chief executive replacement prospects. They interview a range of candidates, bring them on as key lieutenants, and put together an action plan for how and when the sitting CEO will retire at a defined moment in the future. The timing is carefully orchestrated.

Choosing the right temporal design requires deliberation: What should be done first? Should I proceed incrementally, develop a prototype, and then test the waters? Should I pause, or would it be better to move as fast as possible? Each approach has its place, depending on the larger context. This book will help you choose the best temporal design—that is, the right sequence, rate, rhythm, and so on for what you need and what to do. George Mitchell—who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in Northern Ireland—provides a good example of effective temporal design when he describes planning a meeting between the United Kingdom's Prime Minister Tony Blair and Ireland's Prime Minister Bertie Ahern:

This account contains two critical decisions. The first was about temporal punctuation (discussed in Chapter Three). Mitchell demanded a continuous rather than a discontinuous process. There would be no gaps, no time-outs, no pauses, just one long effort to reach an agreement. The second decision was about when this particular design was needed. Having gained the respect of both parties, Mitchell had the power to choose. Of equal importance, however, is that he realized that he had a choice and that one design was likely to be more effective than another at this particular moment.

A TIMING ANALYSIS

A timing analysis is a structured method for finding the facts you need to make better timing decisions in any situation. At the most fundamental level, it consists of three steps: (1) finding patterns in your work and in your environment, (2) analyzing them, and (3) using the information they contain to make decisions.

The heart of a timing analysis is the search for patterns—but not just any pattern. The patterns that matter for answering questions of timing have two characteristics. First, they are composed of six elements, which I will name in a moment. Second, they have a particular structure that can be illustrated using a familiar image: a musical score. For those of you who don't happen to be musicians, I have reproduced part of the score from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in Figure I.1.

Don't worry about the complexity of this particular score. No musical knowledge is required. It is the overall structure of a musical score that is important.

As you can see, a musical score has a vertical and horizontal dimension. Different instruments (arrayed vertically) play different parts. The notes making up the parts are played in sequence, from left to right on or between sets of horizontal lines. Notes played at the same time create chords or harmonies or, in some music, dissonance. Notes played one after another create melodies. The relationships among the notes constituting the horizontal and vertical dimensions define and create the composition.

If you think for a moment about your own work, the analogy to a musical score will become clear. Every situation in which timing is important has a lot of moving parts. Many things are going on simultaneously (the vertical dimension). One firm may be doing one thing; another firm may be doing something else. Every individual or group will be playing its own tune—or at least trying to (the horizontal dimension). Each tune (a set of actions) will have its own sequence, pace, and rhythm. The way these different and overlapping tunes play out together—whether they are in harmony, create dissonance, or just produce noise or chaos—will determine when conditions are right for certain kinds of actions.

Figure I.1 Part of the Score from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony⁹

If you look closely at what is going on in any business environment, you will see that it is composed of six elements. The first five—sequence, punctuation, interval, rate, and shape—define and describe the horizontal dimension of the score. The sixth adds multiple layers and hence the vertical dimension. I'm going to borrow the musical term polyphony (many voices or sounds) for this final element. Let me briefly define each element.

• Sequence. This element refers to the order of events, like the notes in a melody. In any situation where timing matters, it is useful and often essential to have a sense of what follows what. First you manufacture something and then you sell it, or perhaps the reverse: first you sell it, and then you build or manufacture it.
• Temporal punctuation. This element refers to times when events or processes begin, pause, or come to an end. Temporal punctuation functions like linguistic punctuation, inserting commas, periods, and so on into what would otherwise be a continuous stream of action or events. Every business has deadlines; every plan or process has a start date.
• Interval and duration. This element indicates how much time elapses between events (the length of the interval) and how long each event lasts or will take (its duration). Everything in business, as in life, takes time.
• Rate. This element refers to how quickly events are happening. Some things develop quickly, others more slowly. Who hasn't had a project run over time and over budget, or been surprised by how quickly business conditions can change?
• Shape. This element describes rhythms and other patterns of movement, such as cycles, feedback loops, and peaks and valleys. For example, will a market bottom look like a V, a W, or something else?
• Polyphony. In any pattern, many things may be going on simultaneously, each with its own trajectory. Polyphony raises the question of their interrelationship. A slowdown in China, combined with a crisis in the EU, can affect economic conditions in the United States.

What makes a firm work is the way its parts are organized. The same is true of the six elements. It is the way they come together musically to form vertically and horizontally organized patterns that gives us insight into timing. For example, a window may open when a particular chord sounds—that is, when certain conditions are present at the same time (a market exists, your product is ready, and your competitor is years behind). When different conditions are present, the result can be a perfect storm or a tragic accident. What I like to say is that if you want to get the timing right, you need to know the score!¹⁰

I will refer to the patterns we need to find as temporal architecture because of the way they are built and structured, the uses to which they are put, and because, like spatial architecture, they have an esthetic or emotional quality. They feel right or wrong, good or bad for the task at hand. (A more detailed discussion of temporal architecture can be found in the Appendix.) As you find and examine the patterns of temporal architecture, you will discover that you know much more about timing and how a situation is likely to develop than you thought. What seemed unknown or uncertain will appear less so.

A timing analysis does not attempt to predict the future. Rather it is a way to work with patterns that are already present, simply unseen or unexamined. Neither is it the application of an abstract model, framework, or set of research findings. What works in the laboratory, for one company, in one industry, or at one time in history may not apply to the challenges you face. Instead, a timing analysis is best thought of as a set of diagnostic and analytic tools for working with the idiosyncratic, complex, messy, real-world situations that you actually face—with, as they say, conditions on the ground.

A timing analysis has multiple uses. It will complement and extend the way you and your organization currently manage and decide issues of timing and, when necessary, critique and correct them. It will also provide a common language for discussing timing. A common language makes it easier for different parts of an organization, each speaking its own dialect (the language of finance, economics, software engineering, marketing, and so on) to talk and work with each other. Timing solutions developed in one department or division can be shared as well as codeveloped with others. The result will be a more coordinated timing strategy for the firm as whole.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

In order to see patterns, we need to find their component elements. That is the task of the first six chapters. Each chapter describes one element. Think of each chapter as a lens (a set of examples, illustrations, places to look, and knowledge of what to look for) that helps you search for and examine that particular element in detail.

We have all heard the saying, Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. You will find many places in this book where a specific example, tool, or technique will have immediate application in your business. It solves a particular problem, helps you make a difficult decision, and so on. That's the first part of the proverb. But the reason I use the lens metaphor is that the chapters in this book serve a broader function. They will teach you to see and analyze timing issues in any situation, in the same way that you can use binoculars to view any object and find details not previously visible. That's the second part of the proverb, and to my mind, the deeper and more important takeaway from each chapter.

Each of the first six chapters begins with an example or two. The examples will orient you and help you see the element in context. I also describe the characteristics of that element in detail. There are usually no more than half a dozen characteristics, depending on the element. These characteristics are important because they are a source of timing-related risks. You can use the information about risk in two ways: to prepare for what you might encounter in the future, and, retrospectively, to understand how timing-related mistakes might have caused a plan or project to fall short of expectations. The section on risk in each chapter is usually followed by one on options and opportunities. These describe ways to use that element to make your work more effective and profitable. The last part of each chapter is titled “The Temporal Imagination.” This short concluding section describes something that I found particularly intriguing. I think of this section as dessert after the main course. It is intended to be light and frothy—although I must admit I occasionally include one that could be a meal in itself.

I also include a chapter summary at the end of each of the lens chapters to highlight the main ideas.

The seventh chapter—The Timing of Dissent—brings all the elements together to demonstrate how the six timing lenses apply in a common business situation—a meeting where a CEO and his colleagues are discussing whether or not to launch a new product. The chapter illustrates how to use each of the elements to make one's comments timely and effective.

Finally, the last chapter of the book provides a set of steps and general guidelines for conducting a timing analysis. This chapter builds on the foundation laid in the previous chapters.

As you train your eye to find the elements of temporal architecture and the patterns they form, you will discover a richer and more complex world. That is always the case when you look beneath any surface, examine the infrastructure of a building, or take an MRI of the brain. The goal of a timing analysis, however, is not to add complexity but to restore it, to bring back what our eye doesn't see and our mind doesn't consider. The good news is that a timing analysis provides a way to organize this complexity. That is what makes it powerful.

Another source of the power of a timing analysis is that it applies in nearly every situation an executive is likely to face. One reason is that barriers which prevent us from getting the timing right are not limited to a specific setting, organization, or role: we bring them with us in the form of Copland's Constraint and the brain's Q capacity, among others. The second reason is that the tools and techniques of a timing analysis are highly general. Indeed, it would be inefficient and counterproductive to treat the world as a set of silos where we must think one way in one situation and a different way in another. We need tools that work in multiple settings.

In a complex world, there is always a combination of factors—financial, legal, economic, organizational, competitive, strategic, political, and psychological aspects, among others—for leaders and executives to consider. For this reason, this book contains a diversity of examples. Leaders and executives need to think broadly, to explore all the different facets of an issue before making a decision about timing, particularly if a lot is at stake. Furthermore, to develop skill in matters of timing requires that we learn to look beneath the surface of an issue to its underlying temporal design or architecture, and the best way to do that is to see the same timing principle at work in different contexts.

The examples that fill each chapter fall into two basic categories. Some describe conditions in the world, what is going on in a particular setting or environment. Others describe actions that you or others might undertake. These categories reflect the dual use of a timing analysis, which is to understand your environment so that you know when to act and then to design a time-extended course of action that is effective in that context.

THE ART OF TIMING

Although I will provide you with practical tools to solve timing problems, I think it is fair to recognize that skill in matters of timing is an art. It is not something we can automate or do “by the numbers.” I can think of no better illustration of the art of timing than a description of a rehearsal by Peter Brook, one of the legendary theater directors (italics mine).

We know from this description that Brook is a master. He is reading his environment perfectly. He knows what issues he will face, and when, and how his actions at those precise moments will determine the success or failure of the rehearsal. His focus is not just on the play or on the skills of the actors but on the temporal design of the rehearsal. He listens for the rhythm of what is going on, for its moments of tension or release, for moments when he must pause and change direction. There is a sense in which this quotation captures what timing expertise is like in any domain.

You cannot acquire overnight the level of skill that Brook demonstrates. But time spent building your timing skill is well spent if you and your organization want to spot opportunities first, execute on them well, and avoid costly mistakes. When you are done reading this book, you will have a powerful new way to look at what you do every day. Your actions and activities will be better timed and hence more likely to succeed.