K Shel Blogs

The role of temporal alignment in sustainable change

Have you come across the ‘Red Queen hypothesis‘? Borne from the Lewis Carroll masterpiece, it captures the Red Queen’s observation: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”. In evolutionary terms, it describes competitive environments where organisms must keep adapting simply to avoid falling behind. Change is continuous; the tempo is fast, and survival depends on matching it. The slightly lesser known ‘Red King effect‘, by contrast, describes cooperative environments, where slower evolution can yield greater advantage. Here, stability influences outcomes as much as adaptation.

Biology makes the distinction obvious. Viruses reshape themselves in days; trees adjust over decades. Fast-breeding species depend on volume and rapid turnover; long-lived species rely on deliberation and slow cycles (think rabbits vs elephants). Neither strategy is inherently superior. Each is viable only because it aligns with the tempo of its environment.

Both concepts point to a deeper systems principle: tempo matters, different environments demand different paces, and viability depends on recognising which one you are in – which raises the question: how accurately do we read the tempo of the systems we try to influence? If every system has a characteristic rhythm – a pace at which it can metabolise disturbance and integrate change – then we need to ask whether we’re treating tempo as a structural property to diagnose, or merely as a preference to impose.

Take the behaviour of human systems, and how we seem to resist applying this biological insight to organisational life. Perhaps it’s a form of hubris – the belief that intention and effort should simply overcome structural constraints. Or maybe because acknowledging tempo as a system property threatens our sense of agency. Whatever the reason, the result is consistent: we routinely mismatch intervention pace to system capacity.

Consider how organisations handle cultural change. A new strategy is announced, training is delivered, and leadership expects measurable shifts within weeks. But cultural norms can operate on generational timelines – they shift through earned accumulated micro-interactions, not programmatic directives. The intervention isn’t wrong; its tempo is. We’re trying to change trees on a virus timeline.

The inverse happens too. Markets move weekly; regulatory frameworks respond annually. By the time policy catches up to innovation, the landscape has already shifted twice over. Again, the failure isn’t in the quality of regulation – it’s in the temporal mismatch between fast-moving practice and slow-moving governance.

The mismatch extends further to how we observe systems. Measurement itself operates at a tempo, and when that tempo misaligns with system dynamics, our data misleads us. Sample too frequently and noise masquerades as signal – we react to fluctuations that would self-correct if left alone, introducing interventions that destabilise rather than guide. Sample too infrequently and we miss inflection points entirely – responding only after critical thresholds have been crossed, when the system has already reorganised around new conditions. The system appears chaotic or unresponsive because we’re not seeing its behaviour, only out-of-sync glimpses produced by our own arbitrary observational cadence.

Correct diagnosis begins with recognising tempo as a fundamental attribute of a system. Each subsystem has its own timescale, and interventions must respect it. Some elements must move quickly to remain responsive; others must operate more slowly to remain coherent. When we impose a single pace across heterogeneous processes, misalignment becomes inevitable.

Effective intervention, then, becomes less about the brilliance of our strategy and more about working at the pace the system can absorb.

Which adds a crucial question to any systemic intervention – alongside “What should we do?” is the question “At what pace should we do it – At what pace can this system absorb, and respond, and learn?“. Answer that, and the rest becomes possible. Ignore it, and you’re running on the wrong clock – wondering why nothing takes hold, why change feels effortful, why outcomes keep disappointing.

Tempo isn’t incidental. It’s a precondition for viability.