# Pace layers _Before you pick the intervention, figure out how fast the problem actually moves._ --- You're nine months into leading a division that grew by acquisition eighteen months ago. The commercial integration went smoothly: shared CRM, unified pricing, combined pipeline reviews. All of that landed in the first quarter. But the two legacy teams still operate like separate companies. They use different terminology for the same metrics, run parallel processes for the same workflows, and default to their original reporting lines when anything gets difficult. In the last all-hands, someone from the acquired business referred to "your customers" when speaking to someone from the parent. Nobody corrected it. Your boss is losing patience. The synergy case assumed a single operating culture by month twelve. You're at month eighteen and the teams still split along the old boundary. So you do what feels right. You launch a values alignment programme. You run joint offsites. You create cross-team working groups with shared OKRs and a quarterly review cadence. You commission an internal survey to baseline cultural integration and set a target for six months out. --- Three months later the survey scores are flat. The working groups met twice and then quietly stopped scheduling. The joint offsite produced a list of shared principles that sits in a slide deck nobody has reopened. The teams are polite to each other, but when a customer escalation lands, each side still runs its own process. You're frustrated. The programme was well designed, well resourced, and had senior sponsorship. The activities happened. The change didn't. You start wondering whether the problem is the people, whether the acquired team simply isn't willing to integrate. You consider whether some of them need to go. --- Before you reach for that lever, look at what you actually did. You treated a problem that moves in years with tools that operate in quarters. Joint offsites, shared OKRs, alignment workshops: these are quarterly-cadence interventions. They change what people focus on this cycle. They don't change how people think about who they are and where they belong. The commercial integration worked because pricing, pipeline, and CRM are things that flex at commercial speed. You can change a price list in a week. Culture, the shared assumptions and habits and unspoken loyalties that determine how people actually behave when nobody is watching, moves on a different timescale entirely. It shifts through accumulated experience, through working alongside someone long enough that the boundary between "us" and "them" dissolves because you've solved enough problems together. That process takes years. Possibly longer than the synergy model allows. --- Watch what happens when you apply a fast intervention to a slow problem. The activities complete on schedule. The programme milestones are hit. The quarterly review shows deliverables achieved. And nothing underneath has moved. The values workshop happened. People nodded. They went back to their desks and carried on exactly as before, because a two-day offsite can't rewrite fifteen years of professional identity. The cross-team OKRs were technically shared, but each side optimised for the metrics they understood, which were the ones from their legacy business. You generated motion without movement. Effort without change. This is the signature failure mode: the intervention looks like it worked because it completed, whilst the problem it was supposed to address continued at its own pace, untouched. --- The failure runs the other way too. A few months earlier, before the cultural frustration set in, you noticed that the acquired team's sales process had a bottleneck. Leads were taking three weeks to convert because the quoting tool required manual configuration that a simpler workflow could eliminate. A process fix, adjustable in weeks. Instead of fixing the workflow, your predecessor had commissioned a strategic review of the combined go-to-market model. It took four months, involved a consulting firm, and produced a sixty-page document recommending a phased transformation of the sales organisation. By the time the recommendation landed, the acquired team had lost two reps who were tired of fighting the quoting tool, and three mid-market prospects had gone cold during the wait. The problem was moving fast. The intervention was moving slow. The bottleneck compounded while the strategy document made its way through review cycles and stakeholder alignment. A process that needed a quick fix got wrapped in a structural overhaul it didn't require. --- The distinction is diagnostic. When something isn't working, the first question is how fast this particular problem moves. Quarterly targets, incentives, where you point people's attention this cycle: these shift in weeks. Processes, tooling, how work flows through the organisation: these change in months. Strategy, what markets you're in, what you're building, where you're headed: this should be stable for years and adjusted deliberately. Capabilities, the skills and systems that take years to build: these can't be rushed without breaking something. And culture, the deep layer of identity and habit: this moves slowest of all, shaped gradually by what people experience over time. Stewart Brand called these pace layers. Different parts of a system changing at different speeds, and meant to. The fast layers experiment and adapt. The slow layers provide memory and stability. Problems come when you mistake which layer you're looking at and reach for the wrong speed of response. --- Back in your division, you stop running programmes aimed at forcing cultural integration by quarter. Instead you do something simpler. You pair people from both legacy teams on real customer problems, the kind where they have to figure it out together because neither side has the full picture alone. You make sure the pairings last long enough to build working relationships, not a two-week project but a six-month account responsibility. You stop measuring cultural integration on a survey and start tracking whether cross-team collaboration is happening naturally in the ordinary course of work. You also fix the quoting tool. It takes two weeks. The acquired team's conversion time drops by half. The fast problem got a fast fix. The slow problem got patience, the right conditions, and time. Twelve months later the "us and them" language has faded, not because of a programme, but because people have been solving problems together long enough that the old boundary stopped feeling relevant. --- [[Designing the organisation]] reshapes structure. This is about something prior: knowing which layer of the system your problem actually lives in, so you reach for an intervention that matches its speed. The synergy model, the board's timeline, your own impatience: none of these change the rate at which culture moves. Pushing harder on a slow layer doesn't accelerate it. It just produces activity that feels like progress while the layer underneath continues at its own pace. When the fix isn't working, check whether you've got the speed right before you blame the people or the programme. ---