On a Different Clock

Why Your People Aren’t Slow. They Just Heard About It Yesterday.

Issue 286, October 15, 2026

I have been in Portugal and the south of France for the past two weeks, working, teaching and exploring. For all of that time, I have been five to six hours ahead of the people I work with. By the time my team and my clients sit down at their desks, my day is more than half over, and by the time they hit their stride, I am thinking about dinner. When I am at my sharpest, they are asleep. We are on different clocks, and no amount of effort on either side of the pond changes that.

The other side of it is the jet lag, which is the reason I had trouble coming up with a topic last week and, as it turns out, the reason I ended up with this one. The CDC’s current guidance says the body adjusts at about an hour a day when you fly east, so a five- to six-hour shift takes most of a week to absorb, and I’ll be adjusted just in time to fly home and start over. For the first several days, the alarm goes off at seven, and your body insists it is the middle of the night. You spend the morning in a fog; you know perfectly well what you should be doing, but there is no desire to take anything on, and then at eleven at night you are suddenly wide awake. Your body is on the old clock, whether you fight it or not.

Somewhere in the middle of one of those first foggy mornings, I realized I was describing what most of the workforce experiences during most change initiatives.

The leadership team of an organization decides on a change. They have been living with it for months. They argued about it, got comfortable with it, worked through what it means, and moved on to the next thing. Then the announcement goes out, and from that morning forward the workforce is on a completely different clock. They heard about it only yesterday, which puts them at the beginning of something leadership finished a long time ago, and when they react the way anyone reacts at the beginning, leadership reads it as slow, or resistant, or simply not getting it.

In reality, it’s a time difference being read as a human character difference. Last week I wrote about the misread, the habit of reading structural friction as individual resistance. And yes, I was in a bit of a jet-lag haze writing that piece as well. What I am describing is one of the most common versions of the misread and one of the easiest to miss because everyone involved is looking at the same calendar but not recognizing what time zone each is in.

Change Is the Event. Transition Is the Clock.

William Bridges drew the line, and it’s one I keep coming back to. Change is situational: the new system goes live, the department merges, the reporting line moves, and it happens on a date. Transition is always psychological. It’s the process of letting go of how things were, living for a while in the in-between that Bridges called the neutral zone, where the old way is gone, and the new way isn’t real yet, and eventually finding your footing. None of that happens on a date. It happens at whatever pace a person can manage, and that pace is different for everyone.

Bridges also described something he called the marathon effect. Picture the start of a big city marathon. The front runners are off and moving at full pace before the people in the back have taken a step. By the time the back of the pack crosses the starting line, the leaders are miles down the road, and if they bothered to look back, everyone behind them would look like they were standing still. In an organization, the leadership team is at the front. They started their transition when the idea first came up, in the strategy session, in the board conversation, in the months of discussions before deciding. By announcement day they have already let go of the old way. They have done their own grieving, if there was any, and they are focused on the new thing.

So on the day of the town hall, the room contains two groups of people at completely different points in the same transition, and neither group quite understands where the other is. Leadership is done deciding and can’t understand why there are so many questions about things that were settled months ago. The workforce is at the starting line, hearing it for the first time, doing exactly what leadership did at the starting line, which is to feel uncertain and ask questions as they process what it means to them, their teams, and their departments. Leadership experiences those questions as pushback, even as criticism, and often gets defensive as a result. The workforce experiences leadership’s impatience as proof that nobody wants to hear from them and that they should just suck it up and move on. Both are wrong. Each side has simply forgotten, or never knew, where the other one is standing.

What the Gap Sounds Like

You have surely experienced this gap. A leader starts a sentence with “as you know” about something most of the room is hearing for the first time. Someone asks a question and gets “we already covered that,” when it was covered three months ago in a meeting they weren’t in, or in an email that was easy to let slip by unopened. An executive in the middle of a Q&A is visibly bored with her own slides, because she has seen them twenty times and the people in front of her have seen them once. And then, a few weeks later in the leadership meeting, come the questions I have heard in some form more times than I can count. Why aren’t they further along? What aren’t they getting? Didn’t the training help? The honest answer, most of the time, is that they only just started processing it.

The gap shows up in the measures too. Adoption gets measured against the date the change went live, because that is the date on the project plan. But the project plan is the leadership’s clock. For most of the organization, the change began the day they heard about it, and for a lot of them it began the day it first touched their own work, which may have been weeks after that. So the dashboard says the organization is ninety days in and adoption is behind, while the people being measured are thirty days in and roughly where anyone would be at thirty days, still trying to figure things out. The number is accurate, but as usual it is measuring the wrong thing and starting at the wrong point in time.

Why Leaders Forget They Had the Time

Leaders aren’t being careless when they do this. They just don’t think about it, and it happens to nearly everyone, for two reasons.

The first is that transition happens in private. In 1984, Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman published a finding that Michelle Pipes and I talk about on this week’s episode of The Human Factor Podcast, the first of two with her. People do not respond to a change. They respond to their appraisal of what the change means for them, and that appraisal gets formed well before the official communication reaches them. Leadership did its appraising over months, with information, with each other, with the chance to argue and to be reassured. It was a long process and most of it happened out of view, in conversations that were never written down. By the time the announcement is drafted, the people drafting it have forgotten that the conclusion they are now communicating took them half a year to reach. They remember the conclusion and not the time it took.

The second one has a name. In 1989, Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber published a paper in the Journal of Political Economy describing what they called the curse of knowledge: once you know something, you have a very hard time imagining not knowing it, and you consistently overestimate how much of what you know is obvious to other people. It is why experts write bad instructions and why the person who built the spreadsheet can’t understand why nobody else can use it. In change, the leadership team has spent months becoming experts in the change they have decided to implement. The reasons for it feel obvious to them because they have already processed the reasons over and over again. So the announcement comes out in the language of the people who are already in the know, aimed at people who aren’t, and the leaders, of course, can’t hear the difference.

It isn’t a flaw or an error. It is what happens to anyone at the front of the pack. But that view backward has consequences, because the fix that gets adopted is almost always the wrong one.

The People on Both Clocks

There is one group that lives on both clocks at once, and two weeks ago I wrote about what is happening to them. Middle managers usually hear about a change a little before their teams do, sometimes a week, sometimes a day, occasionally an hour. That isn’t enough time to do their own transition, but it’s got to be enough because they have to stand in front of their people and communicate the decision as if they had been part of making it all along. So they are at the starting line themselves, still absorbing it, while being asked to pace the people behind them and report upward to people who are miles ahead and wondering what’s taking so long. Anyone who has been a manager during a reorganization knows the feeling of defending something out loud that you only heard about that morning. It’s a particular kind of exhaustion.

Pushing Through

Here is what I did on my second day in Portugal, which is what I do on the second day of every trip east, and the second day is usually worse than the first. I decided I would simply push through the jet lag. I would get up at a normal hour, take on some work, stay awake until a normal bedtime, and force my body onto the new clock by sheer will. I lasted until about three in the afternoon, fell asleep sitting up, and lost my mind the rest of the day.

Organizations push through in the same way and with the same result. When the workforce appears to be behind, the response is to compress: shorten the rollout, add a second wave of communications that mostly repeats the first wave louder, bring the training in earlier, set a deadline for adoption and tie something to it. All of it amounts to the leaders at the front of the pack yelling back at the people who just left the starting line to run faster. And all of it ignores what Bridges spent his later career saying, which is that you can schedule the change but you can’t schedule the transition. People let go of the old way at the pace they can let go of it, and pressure doesn’t shorten that. What pressure does, unfortunately, is make people stop telling you where they actually are, and a transition that has gone quiet is easy to mistake for one that is finished.

The Other Direction

Sometimes it runs the other way, and that one catches leaders by surprise. The workforce is ahead. The people doing the work saw the problem the change is meant to solve a year before leadership did, lived with it, built workarounds, and gave up expecting anyone to fix it. When the change is finally announced, they are not at the starting line. They were at the finish line long ago and have moved on to something else, which is usually quiet skepticism. Leadership, just now at its own starting line and full of enthusiasm, reads that as resistance too, when in reality it’s the exhaustion of people who have been waiting at the far end of the course for someone to show up. The clocks are still different, just in the other direction, with one group that started early and another that is only now getting its shoes on.

Whose Clock

I am writing this at seven in the morning, through the fog, which tells you how the adjusting is going. By the time most of you read it I will be off the plane and home, about to do the whole thing again in the other direction, where at least the body is kinder and gives you an hour and a half a day.

So a few things to notice this week.

The next time someone in a leadership meeting says “as you know,” ask yourself who in the organization actually knows it, and since when. The next time you hear “why aren’t they further along,” ask how long it took the people in the room to get where they are. Check the date on the adoption report and ask whether it’s the date the change went live or the date the people being measured first heard about it. And look at the people who seem checked out before the change has even started, and ask whether they might have finished this race a year ago, alone.

Leadership is on one clock, and the people doing the work are on another, and the gap between them says less about anyone’s attitude than about when each of them was allowed to start.

So when you look at your own change, the one that is live right now, whose clock are you reading it by? And what would the same picture look like if you read it by the other one?

Related Reading

The Misread (Issue 285). Last week, on structural friction read as individual resistance. The clock gap is the version of it that hides inside a calendar.

The Grief You Can’t Name (Issue 237). On the losses inside a change and why they have to be acknowledged before anyone can move. Leadership did its grieving in private. Everyone else is doing it now.

Small Waves (Issue 281). A conversation at the beach, and the changes that never get announced at all. The other end of this issue, where nobody is on any clock because nobody told them a race had started.

Managing Individual and Team Transitions for Transformation Success. From 2021, where I first wrote about Bridges’ three questions: what will we no longer be doing, what will be different, and who will lose what.

The Misfortunes of Uninformed Urgency. Urgency that begets action before thinking. Pushing through a transition is the same mistake with a deadline attached.

On The Human Factor Podcast

Measuring What Change Feels Like, with Dr. Michelle Pipes. The first of two conversations, out this week, on Lazarus and Folkman, appraisal, and why the dashboard measures the change while the human signal goes dark.

Research Sources

1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2026). Jet Lag Disorder. CDC Yellow Book, 2026 edition. Source for the average rate of adaptation of about one hour per day for eastward travel and one and a half hours per day for westward travel.

2. Bridges, William, with Bridges, Susan (2016). Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, fourth edition. Da Capo Lifelong Books. First published 1991. Source of the distinction between change and transition, the three phases of transition, and the marathon effect.

3. Lazarus, Richard S., and Folkman, Susan (1984). Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. Springer. Source of the finding that people respond to their appraisal of an event rather than to the event itself.

4. Camerer, Colin, Loewenstein, George, and Weber, Martin (1989). The Curse of Knowledge in Economic Settings: An Experimental Analysis. Journal of Political Economy, volume 97, number 5, pages 1232 to 1254.

5. Pipes, Michelle (2026). The Human Factor Podcast, Season 3, Measuring What Change Feels Like, part one. Recorded September 2026, released October 15, 2026.