The Time Problem: Technology, Money, and People Have Different Clock Speeds
March 25, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
Here’s a comment by steveBK123.
My experience as well. Waterfall is like – let’s think about where we want this product to go, and the steps to get there. Agile is like ADHD addled zig zag journey to a destination cutting corners because we are rewriting a component for the third time, to get to a much worse product slightly faster. Now we can do that part 10x faster, cool. The thing is, at every other level of the company, people are actually planning in terms of quarters/years, so the underlying product being given only enough thought for the next 2 weeks at a time is a mismatch.
Mr. BK123 posted it to an essay titled “Every Layer of Review Makes You 10x Slower.”
The write up “Every Layer…” runs through management practices that slam the brakes on moving quickly. At the same time, implementing quality assurance undermines the quality of the product or output. One can agree or disagree with the ideas spelled out in “Every Layer….” I want to focus on Mr. BK123’s observation about time. I think it is accurate and under appreciated.
In an organization (traditional or New Age), functions and the people responsible for these have different clock speeds. Consider this example for a company with several dozen people. The financial people have clocks that tick to weekly paycheck, monthly bank reconciliations, and maybe quarterly reports. Speed is defined within this financial context. Deadlines are determined by relatively inflexible frameworks. Therefore, those in finance work feverishly to meet the deadline and then do it again and again. In most companies, once the business process is set up and working it does not get revamped every few days. The marketing department is different. A trade show requires a specific clock that operates at a cadence determined by booth preparations, publishing collateral, signing contracts, lining up people, and setting up meetings with “must connect” targets. The financial people have zero clue about trade shows or any of the other marketing tasks like getting a product person on a podcast. Those engaged in technology, however, have multiple clocks running. These are normal clocks like updating software. Then there are chaotic clocks like responding to a failure, attending a meeting and learning that a core requirement has changed, or learning that a security problem exists and must be fixed immediately.
The executives at this meeting each has a different clock. Each interprets work according to his or her unit’s clock. Time conflicts slow down work. Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.
Most of the clock confusion is worked out in meetings. But meetings about software and many other issues makes in the words of “Every Layer…”:
Every layer of review makes you 10x slower….Every layer of approval makes a process 10x slower.
Now organizations have two problems: Different clocks and processes that slow work down. Is there a fix? No, “Every Layer…” says:
AI can’t fix this.
The essay “Every Layer…” suggests that trust, fallibility (which I interpret as “good enough”), and modularity (which I think means small units, not sky-scraper monoliths) allow an organization to get code written and other tasks completed.
But I want to come back to Mr. BK123’s observation about “mismatch.” Is the stress of work in modern organizations due to these different clocks? The offices I have visited in the last couple of years have been eerily empty. People are with customers, at off-site meetings, or working from a coffee shop. When I visited my father’s office when he worked at LeTourneau in the 1950s, there were people everywhere. When he went to the office on Saturday morning to finish something, there were other people at their desks. Today there are Zooms, Teams, and Slacks.
Several observations:
- Adding AI to the work mix is likely to disrupt these different clocks. None will work at the speed of AI, yet the humans have to use or do something with the AI outputs. That means human time collides with AI time. The result is stress or just using what AI generates and let the systems fail where they may.
- The new communications methods do not eliminate but they alter the old-fashioned “everyone in the office” approach that was common not too long ago. Could slow downs and inefficiencies result from these new methods?
- The fix in many organizations is “just do it.” That works in some types of organizations, but in others the approach can lead to somewhat notable outcomes; for example, the driverless car runs over a jogger.
Net net: I think the task of management and organizing work processes warrants research, management attention, and a realization that going slow may have an upside.
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2026
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