Aug 6, 2024
At be radical, organizational longevity is a subject of endless interest. We talk frequently with our clients and each other internally about how organizations can be better designed to weather continuous change and achieve sustainable relevance over the long term.
One of my favorite models for thinking about change—and resilience—in systems (and human organizations) over time is Stewart Brand’s Pace Layer framework. Brand built his model—articulated in various writings over the years and in conversations with Brian Eno and the Stanford historian and forecaster Paul Saffo—on the work of the architect Frank Duffy, and in his book How Buildings Learn, he initially proposed six layers of elements that compose a building, each layer of which has a different scale and rate of change.
In The Clock of the Long Now and later works, Brand extended the model beyond the world of architectural design to explore how the “combination of fast and slow components” together can make a complex system—up to and including a civilization—resilient.
“Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power. All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure; it is what makes them adaptable and robust.”
Brand wasn’t thinking about organizations when he developed the Pace Layers model, but the leap isn’t a hard one to make. Organizations are human systems that are deeply interested in learning, innovating, adapting, and thriving through change—especially in a historical moment like our own where change (even on some of deeper, slower layers of Brand’s civilizational model) seems to be not only accelerating but also increasingly volatile.
So what does the framework offer for organizations? I’ve come to think that the idea of “pace layering” can be usefully applied to organizational learning and strategy to understand how the org can understand innovation and change on different time horizons and against long-term goals. The exact definition of layers is somewhat arbitrary, but we might define them for the org roughly as follows:
Core Purpose & Strategy: Slowest layer. This is the long-term vision, the WHY, and the essential objectives of the org.
Company Values: Second slowest layer, defines company culture – WHO the org is and HOW employees work together.
Infrastructure & Operations: A middle layer consisting of operational infrastructure, policies, and flows used to get work done.
Priority Projects: These are the shorter-term initiatives designed to achieve current, near-term objectives. This is a faster, more changeable and responsive layer.
Actions & Communications: The fastest layer. Immediate actions, reactions, and responses to the current environment.
Mapping org activity in times of change (e.g., anything from a broad transformation initiative to a rebrand to the rollout of a new AI strategy with affiliated products and services) onto pace layers offers a valuable and clarifying schematic both for thinking through differentiated KPIs and for anticipating the likely interactions between layers—and the varied rates and scales of change as the organization is feeling its way into the future.
Pascal & I have been talking pace layers essentially since we met nearly a decade ago in Mountain View. If you’ve used the model for thinking about organizations or other human systems (below the civilization-scale), we’d love to hear from you.
@Jeffrey
