In recent weeks, I’ve found myself in recurrent conversation and reflection about time, pacing, relationality, and flow. These threads have been weaving in reflexive navigation of collaborations and convenings alongside colleagues, friends, organizations, and processes. In these different spaces of encounter and exchange, I have noticed moments of profound resonance as well as deep dissonance that seem somehow tethered to time:
- Moments when time feels like a soft companion, and others where time feels like a burden, a foe, or both.
- Moments when process seems to circle and circle, conversations belabored and heavy as collectives strive for clarity yet only feel to deepen into complexity.
- Moments when time boundaries have been breached – extending beyond a committed end point, sometimes by a little, sometimes by far more than feels honoring to the people and to the process.
- Moments when collaboration flows nearly seamlessly, where time feels to suspend as conversation becomes a container for craft and creation.
Across these experiences, among many others, the center point of polarity presents as time. Yet, time is not itself the issue. Time is relative – our relationship to it shaped significantly by culture and context.
The deeper invitation these experiences may hold is toward an attentiveness to pacing, which I understand to be our relationship to movement with and through time. In conversation with a dear friend about the processes of one community with which I am involved, he gave voice to a couplet to which I’ve been consistently returning: pace of care and pace of purpose.
Pace of care suggests moving in a way that attends to relationship. It holds the spaciousness to give voice and listen deeply to individual and collective needs, to name experiences of challenge, to process through conflictual dynamics, to celebrate and dignify one another.
Pace of purpose suggests moving in a way that attends to vision. It holds the encouragement to move with generative momentum in the process of creation, to be accountable to commitments, to hold the flexibility to follow emergence while remaining anchored in intention.
How do we move both at the pace of care and at the purpose?
Holding these pacings not as distinct tides, but rather mutually constitutive flows that humanize and give dignity to process, the inquiry might be reframed: How do we move at the pace of intention?
Inhabiting this inquiry has opened a curiosity around notions of efficiency. When this word initially emerged in my reflections, I noticed a resistance. I am wary of how pernicious capitalist impulses of productivity and urgency so powerfully shape relationships to time for so many of us. How efficiency is frequently framed in service of minimizing cost and maximizing profit, too often at the expense of people and the more than human world.
Holding this resistance, my curiosity persisted, curling around contesting embodied experiences: The ease and flow when creative and collaborative processes moved efficiently, and the heaviness and burden when such processes moved at a pace that felt neither caring nor purposeful. The contrast of these experiences illuminated the synergy that expresses itself in the presence of alignment. This felt sense of flow was expressed when there was an alignment of values, purpose, and process, and enhanced when these dimensions were clearly named for collective visibility and accountability.
It is of note that this frame of efficiency does not correlate to speed or even a singular pace. There will be times where we move fast, where we move slow, and even when we pause, because that is what is needed and generative in the moment. This approach to efficiency thus has less to do with a calculus of time, and much more to do with the practices that enable us to move individually and collectively at the pace of intention.
Efficiency (n.): A quality of pacing in creative and collaborative endeavors emergent from remaining in integrity with intention, made possible through alignment of values, purpose, and process.
I am noticing, learning from, and seeking to embody various individual and relational practices to nurture the capacity to move with efficiency at the pace of intention. Here is an incomplete and growing list of such practices that I share with humility and curiosity about what your practices may be:
- Ensure collective visibility and consent to the intention of a given conversation or process.
- Be intentional about the process through which a conversation or collaboration unfolds. For example, ask the questions: How do we want to have this conversation? How do we want to approach this piece of work? What is the sequence of steps or inquiries that best enables us to fulfill our intention?
- Cultivate the capacity to notice and name when a process or conversation is deviating from purpose. In this naming, center choice: Is this a deviation from original purpose that feels generative and important, or is it something that can be held for future conversation?
- Acknowledge when creative process or conversation feels cumbersome. If there is spaciousness to do so, pause so as not force process. Trust that the time will come where creativity and creation will flow effortlessly. (This practice must be held in relationship with the reality of timelines and delivery dates, which sometimes impel engagement despite unideal conditions.)
- Attend to relationships with authenticity and care, always and all ways.
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