When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

by Daniel H. Pink

planning a one-day retreat, university faculty and administrators designing a new institute for computer science—from their very first meeting to the moment they reached their final deadline. Management thinkers believed that teams working on projects moved gradually through a series of stages—and Gersick believed that by videotaping all the meetings and transcribing every word people uttered she could understand these consistent team processes in a more granular way. What she found instead was inconsistency. Teams did not progress steadily through a universal set of stages. They used wildly diverse and idiosyncratic approaches to getting work done. The hospital team evolved differently from the banking team, which evolved differently from the computer science team. However, she wrote, what remained the same, even when everything else was diverging, was “the timing of when groups formed, maintained, and changed.”13