One of the four fogs.
Most professional behaviour is organised around not admitting a particular awareness into the frame: the awareness that time is genuinely limited, that the current approach may not survive contact with the end, that the things which seem to matter most may not matter at all in the terms that will eventually apply.
When this awareness is allowed in — through illness, failure, loss, or simply the accumulation of years — the frame changes. The things that were invisible become visible. The things that seemed fixed become contingent. Priorities reorganise. People become, briefly, available to seeing what they could not see before.
Most of the time, this awareness is held at the edge of the frame and not allowed to enter. The professional structures that make organisations function also make this suppression systematic. The meeting format, the quarterly cycle, the career incentives — all of these are organised, partly, around maintaining the fiction that there is unlimited time to get it right eventually.
The consequence is a particular kind of strategic blindness. Decisions that look sensible inside an infinite time horizon look different when the actual timeline is acknowledged. Commitments that were always provisional become visible as provisional. The urgency of the actual situation — ecological, political, institutional — can be registered rather than managed.
This is not an argument for existential crisis as management strategy. It is an argument for bringing the actual timeline into the frame of decision-making, rather than leaving it outside where it cannot inform the choices being made.
Related
- The four fogs
- Contextual excess
- When your best solution is too slow — essay: the temporal mismatch problem