Playing with Time through the Future
As an entrepreneurial leader, are your decisions in the present guided more by the past or the future? I ask this question because I’ve come to realize that a leader’s relationship with time can be an asset or a liability. Two books that I’ve read in the last month make this clear: The Science of Scaling by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Lead from the Future by Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz.
Johnson and Suskewicz riff on the process of "future-back thinking," which reframes how leaders approach strategic thinking and organizational transformation. Rather than extrapolating solely from current conditions, their methodology urges leaders to envision desired future states and work backward to identify the capabilities, innovations, and strategic moves necessary to achieve those outcomes.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy employs what he calls a “holistic model of time” rather than a linear, sequential orientation to time derived from Newtonian physics. By contrast, Hardy’s holistic model views the past and the future as co-creating the present, with the potentials of “prospection”—thinking about future prospects—as paramount.
Why is this important? One, as Ralph Ellison wrote in “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” this frame allows us to adjust “the past to the present in the interest of the future.” Two, while the past can and should be a reference to learn from, transformative innovation and enterprise scaling are better served by using the future as a psychological tool to inform the present.
How To?
The authors of the two books discussed above have different time scales—no pun intended—for achieving breakthrough growth and scaling. In their growth strategy work, Johnson and Suskewicz project 5-10 years out with their large enterprise clients. Hardy’s model, from what I can determine, is exponential growth in a shorter time frame for smaller enterprises to the lower middle market range ($5 million to $50 million in annual revenues.) Hardy urges entrepreneurs to set a goal so ambitiously, within a timeline so short, that they think it’s impossible. For instance, 10x growth within three years.
Such a change in frame taps into that holistic model of time where goals for the future inspire the vision, strategies, and tactics of everyday work. Though far from easy, Hardy’s path to scaling, after the “impossible” goals and timelines, is to “raise the floor” by ruthlessly “quitting the wrong stuff faster,” eliminating the noise and distraction that preclude scaling. Hardy also suggests simplifying your system.
He tells the story of Steve Jobs’ return to Apple in 1997, when they were losing over $1 billion per year. Apple had over 300 products at the time. Jobs cut the product line down to ten or so connected products and secured a $150 million investment from Microsoft. By 1998, Apple reported a profit of $309 million.
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. . . . Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
—Steve Jobs
The final step, after raising your floor, is to engineer a focused path and scalable business model, and to collaborate with great team members and partners—including AI—to enact and execute it.
Jazz Ways to Play Beyond Linear Time
Yet a future-orientation to time isn’t the only way to play with time beyond the linear.
For example, the way jazz musicians play with time. In an ensemble, the drummer could play a 4/4 swing feel while the bass plays in two, providing rhythmic tension, while the soloist plays double-time sixteenth notes. The underlying pulse, groove, or mood can stay consistent while the musicians improvise rhythmic and melodic variations on a theme. Miles Davis’ second great quintet in the 1960s was known for its finesse in what elsewhere I’ve called “elasticity of time,” shifting not only in tempo but employing metric modulation, where a song in 6/8 time, such as “Footprints” on Miles Smiles, features grand masters Tony Williams and Ron Carter fluidly incorporating a fast 4/4 or 12/8 feel over the original tempo.
Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around.
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
When making love, when dreaming or having a psychedelic experience, or while in the immersive flow of activity that’s both challenging and supporting capacity for growth, our perception of time often shifts. Such shifts expand our awareness beyond the tick-tock of the clock into other dimensions of experience. I believe that such experiences of time beyond the linear inspire a drive for mastery and peak performance.
Playing in Slow Motion: Bill Russell’s Ensemble Flow
Check out how Bill Russell describes it:
Every so often, a Celtics game would heat up so that it became more than a physical or even mental game, and would be magical. When it happened, I could feel my play rise to a new level [where] all sorts of odd things happened: The game would be in the white heat of competition, and yet somehow I wouldn’t feel competitive . . . . The game would move so quickly that every fake, cut, and pass would be surprising, and yet nothing could surprise me. It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken. My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt then that I not only knew all the Celtics by heart, but also all the opposing players, and that they all knew me. There have been many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine.
—Bill Russell, Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man
Russell's experience of ensemble flow, which taps into the future while remaining in the present, describes what can happen when great leaders and ensembles learn to play with time beyond the linear constraints of conventional thinking. In those moments of peak performance, whether on the basketball court, in a jazz club, or in the boardroom, time becomes fluid and expansive rather than rigid and limiting.
Integrating Holistic Time and Future-Back Thinking
An integration of Hardy's holistic time with Johnson and Suskewicz's future-back thinking offers entrepreneurial leaders a pathway to access these transformative temporal states more consistently. Such leaders find themselves anticipating market shifts before they happen, sensing opportunities that others miss, and creating innovations that seem to emerge from nowhere but actually arise from their ability to think and feel from the future backward.
In a world where change accelerates exponentially, linear thinking about time may be one of the most significant limitations holding back your ability to scale. So, step into the breaks between the beats, slip into those moments where time stands still, and discover what becomes possible when you learn to play with time through the future.