Saving Time

If you are among the 13% of the global population (mostly North America and Europe) that observes Daylight Saving Time (DST), hopefully you remembered to set your clocks back one hour before you went to bed Saturday night. DST is a relatively recent enactment; however, even ancient civilizations acknowledged and adjusted to the variation in the amount of sunlight in each day.

Historically, people rose with the sun and slept when it was dark, leading to yearly cyclical variation. In many ways, their lives and habits ebbed and flowed in a rhythmic pattern. For example, the Romans kept time with water clocks that had different scales for different months of the year—longer hours during the summer and shorter ones during the winter. 

Industrialization led to rigid, clock-based schedules supplanting the solar-based routines of agrarian societies. While having a universal measurement for time has many advantages, we sacrificed other things to get it.

DST was originally seen as a way to conserve energy and resources. In 1784, Ben Franklin suggested we would economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. (He also suggested taxing window shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise.) DST was used during WWI and WWII and then standardized in the US by federal law in 1966.

Interestingly, while DST may mean we are up and off work while the sun is up, the disruption in sleep cycles due to the twice a year change is significant and harmful. I’m not suggesting we abandon our modern lifestyles and conveniences. However, I do believe the world we have constructed often prevents us from recognizing our own “seasonal” changes. We may be more efficient, but are we healthier?

Leaders must recognize that people are not mechanisms. While we may need to conform to societal constraints, we will have moments and seasons where we are at our peak performance and moments and seasons where we will struggle to be at our best. Acknowledging and working with these variations instead of mechanically brushing them aside can provide a beneficial balance between efficiency and health that is sustainable and may result in better overall results over time.

The pursuit of efficiency over all other metrics inevitably leads to a system (or community) that is highly adapted to an existing environment but lacks the ability to adapt to changes in the environment. We call this adaptability “resiliency.” Resilient communities are marked by diversity and redundancy (and even some slack) that efficiency often seeks to remove.

In the Harvard Business Review article, “The High Price of Efficiency”, Roger L. Martin makes a case that the drive for efficiency is actually harming the economy and the majority of the people in the U.S. His points, however, are equally applicable to smaller communities like an individual company.

Martin claims that long-term gains and stability are most benefited from a balanced approach between efficiency and resilience. Resilience can be developed by introducing friction, focusing on “good” job creation, and educating our leaders to think in terms of long-term gain.

Friction is often thought of as a bad thing. In their book, The Friction Project, Sutton and Rao talk about positive friction which strengthens the community’s response to change, much like a vaccine prepares the body’s defenses against infection. Great leaders know how to reduce destructive friction while using positive friction to enable the community to become resilient.

“Good” jobs are more engaging, require more knowledge, and are focused on better customer service. Instead of designing for low-skill and minimum (or low) wage positions, investment in people results in lower turnover and increased profitability. It is also necessary to build in some slack (not very efficient) so there is time to create unreasonable team member and customer experiences.

Finally, we need to clearly communicate our intent and educate our leaders to hold a long-term view in one hand and efficiency needs in the other. This requires supporting decisions that sometimes result in a reduction in short-term gains but clearly create long-term stability and resilience.

We all have the same amount of time, and it is natural to want to maximize what we get for the hours we are trading. Ben Franklin said, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Maybe setting the clock to maximize our use of sunlight is a fine idea, but always seeking to increase raw efficiency results in damage to communities and the individuals they are meant to benefit. Spending some of our valuable time building resilience and being available to create unreasonable experiences is both wise and the Bison Way.