When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(32)
Then came a sudden transition. “In a concentrated burst of changes, groups dropped old patterns, reengaged with outside supervisors, adopted new perspectives on their work, and made dramatic progress,” Gersick found. After the initial inert phase, they entered a new heads-down, locked-in phase that executed the plan and hurtled toward the deadline. But even more interesting than the burst itself was when it arrived. No matter how much time the various teams were allotted, “each group experienced its transition at the same point in its calendar—precisely halfway between its first meeting and its official deadline.”
The bankers made their leap forward in designing a new account on “the 17th day of a 34-day span.” The hospital administrators took off in a new, more productive direction in week six of a twelve-week assignment. So it went for every team. “As each group approached the midpoint between the time it started work and its deadline, it underwent great change,” Gersick wrote. Groups didn’t march toward their goals at a steady, even pace. Instead, they spent considerable time accomplishing almost nothing—until they experienced a surge of activity that always came at “the temporal midpoint” of a project.14
Since Gersick obtained results she didn’t expect, and since those results ran counter to the prevailing view, she searched for a way to understand them. “The paradigm through which I came to interpret the findings resembles a relatively new concept from the field of natural history that has not heretofore been applied to groups: punctuated equilibrium,” she wrote. Like those trilobites and snails, teams of human beings working together didn’t progress gradually. They experienced extended periods of inertia—interrupted by swift bursts of activity. But in the case of humans, whose time horizons spanned a few months of work rather than millions of years of evolution, equilibrium always had the same punctuation mark: a midpoint.
For example, Gersick studied one group of business students given eleven days to analyze a case and prepare an explanatory paper. The teammates dickered and bickered at first and resisted outside advice. But on day six of their work—the precise midpoint of their project—the issue of timing parachuted into the conversation. “We’re very short on time,” warned one member. Shortly after that comment, the group abandoned its unpromising initial approach and generated a revised strategy that it pursued to the end. At the halfway mark in this team and the others, Gersick wrote, members felt “a new sense of urgency.”
Call it the “uh-oh effect.”
When we reach a midpoint, sometimes we slump, but other times we jump. A mental siren alerts us that we’ve squandered half of our time. That injects a healthy dose of stress—Uh-oh, we’re running out of time!—that revives our motivation and reshapes our strategy.
In subsequent research, Gersick confirmed the power of the uh-oh effect. In one experiment, she assembled eight teams of MBA students and assigned them, after fifteen or twenty minutes of reading a design brief, to create a radio commercial in one hour. Then, as in her earlier work, she videotaped the interactions and transcribed the conversations. Every group made an uh-oh comment (“Okay, now we’ve reached the halfway point. Now we’re really in trouble.”) between twenty-eight and thirty-one minutes through the one-hour project. And six of these eight teams made their “most significant progress” during a “concentrated midpoint burst.”15
She found the same dynamic over longer periods. In other research, she spent a year following a venture-capital-backed start-up company that she called M-Tech. Entire companies don’t have the finite lives or specific deadlines of small project teams. Yet she found that M-Tech “showed many of the same basic temporally regulated punctuational patterns as project groups show, on a more sophisticated, deliberate level.” That is, M-Tech’s CEO scheduled all the company’s key planning and evaluation meetings in July, the midpoint of the calendar year, and used what he learned to redirect M-Tech’s second-half strategy.
“Midyear transitions, like midpoint transitions in groups, significantly shaped M-Tech’s history,” Gersick wrote. These breaks in time interrupted ongoing tactics and strategies and provided opportunities for management to evaluate and alter the company’s course.”16
Midpoints, as we’re seeing, can have a dual effect. In some cases, they dissipate our motivation; in other cases, they activate it. Sometimes they elicit an “oh, no” and we retreat; other times, they trigger an “uh-oh” and we advance. Under certain conditions, they bring the slump; under others, they deliver the spark.
Think of midpoints as a psychological alarm clock. They’re effective only when we set the alarm, when we can hear its annoying bleep, bleep, bleep go off, and when we don’t hit the snooze button. But with midpoints, as with alarm clocks, the most motivating wake-up call is one that comes when you’re running slightly behind.
HALFTIME SHOW
In the fall of 1981, a nineteen-year-old freshman from Kingston, Jamaica, by way of Cambridge, Massachusetts, walked onto the
campus of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Patrick Ewing didn’t look like most first-year students. He was tall. Toweringly, staggeringly, monumentally tall. Yet he was also graceful, a young man who moved with the fluid quickness of a sprinter.
Ewing had come to Georgetown to help Coach John Thompson establish the school as a national basketball power. And from day one, Ewing was a transforming presence on the court. “A moving giant,” the New York Times called him. “A center for the ages,” said another newspaper. “A 7-foot monster child” who could devour opponent offenses like a “human PAC-MAN,” Sports Illustrated gushed.17 Ewing quickly made Georgetown one of the nation’s top defensive teams. During his freshman season, the Hoyas won thirty games, a school record. For the first time in thirty-nine years, they reached the National Collegiate Athletic Association Final Four, where they won their semifinal game and found themselves playing for the national championship.*