Insights

The Nature of Time in the Game of Business

Dec 16, 2025 - Jill Taylor, Daniel Goodenough
In sports, duration gives shape to the way a game is played. A game ends when the clock runs out, when the final set is played, or when a specific point total is reached. Tennis runs on sets. Soccer on halves. Basketball on quarters. Even golf has its own temporal architecture, measured through a fixed sequence of holes. Everyone steps onto the field already knowing the agreed-upon duration of play.
Business carries its own versions of time agreements, underscoring many of the ways we do business.
  • Quarterly performance – publicly traded companies resetting performance every quarter
  • Monthly progress – privately held companies tracking momentum month by month
  • Annual cycles – boards and shareholders reviewing results each year
  • Three-year arcs – the average tenure and implied runway for many CEOs
  • Election timelines – political leaders navigating governance and fundraising rhythms
  • Project timelines – defined durations for delivering specific outcomes
  • Scrum cycles – tightly managed two-week windows for detailed task execution
  • Flywheel cycles – repeated loops of data, momentum, and measurement
  • Meeting durations – set lengths that shape daily flow and decision-making
  • Day lengths – the stated and implied expectations around a “workday”
  • Work weeks – inherited norms around 40 hours that often expand
  • Time off – vacation, sick leave, and family leave structured through policy
  • Retirement ages – socially and organizationally defined endpoints for a career
Leaders direct significant portions of their attention navigating layers upon layers of duration: deadlines, reporting rhythms, compliance schedules, meeting calendars, productivity cycles, and the unspoken expectations that weave themselves through each day.
What happens when we start to ask questions about our agreed upon expectations of time in business?
  • Who set this timeline?
  • Why does this duration exist?
  • Does it still match reality?
  • Is this cycle creating life or draining it?
  • What shifts when intention shapes our relationship to time rather than inheritance?

These questions perhaps move us in the direction of designing time, instead of simply moving through it.

As we step into a design-oriented view, we might look to living systems for clues about what might be life-giving.

Seasons are an aspect of living systems. There is a season for growth, a season for investment, a season for consolidation, a season for rest. Many companies once allowed fall and winter cycles—periods of building, regrouping, or quiet innovation. A living system understands that timing is not linear. It unfolds.

Clock Time, Awareness Time, and Epiphany

Clock time structures the horizontal world: deadlines, calendars, schedules.
Awareness time lives in the vertical world: presence, discernment, creativity, inner guidance.
Transformation tends to arise in awareness time.
 This is often where epiphany enters – eternity entering into time —an insight, a pattern revealed, a direction clarified. Epiphany does not follow the clock. It arrives when attention deepens, when presence widens, when space opens. Leaders who begin to hold time through both lenses discover that time is fluid. Some things move faster. Some things move slower. Some things complete entirely. What seemed rigid begins to soften.

Intention, Attention, and Game On

The Game On lens invites a question: How might a leader design their time such that duration becomes a source of capability rather than constraint?
Intention sets the blueprint.
Attention is the life force that brings that intention into motion.
When intention and attention work together, duration becomes conscious rather than assumed. External timelines remain, although the leader now stands vertically within them, with access to choice, presence, creativity, and the ability to re-architect agreements when conditions shift.
This stance is the beginning of a living company.
 It is also the moment of agency in the game called business.

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