The Timeline, The Essence and Drift.

Most businesses don’t have a performance problem.

They have a time problem they can’t see.

When I look at performance, I don’t start with efficiency targets, engagement scores or execution plans.

I start with Time. Specifically, the time it takes to convert cash out into cash back in again.

Every business runs on a cash cycle, and that cycle has two inseparable sides. 

One is physical. Materials arriving, moving, being transformed, tested, stored and shipped.

The other is financial. Orders placed, invoices raised, terms applied, payments collected and made.

Different flows. Same journey.

When both sides move smoothly, within sensible handrails, the business feels calm. Predictable. In control. The path isn’t straight, but it’s economical. The 'least wiggly line'.

That’s the reference most leaders carry in their heads, whether they articulate it or not.

 This first picture isn’t a model. It’s a reminder.

Cash doesn’t appear by magic. It follows materials through the system. Where materials pause, cash pauses with them.

You can add dashboards, systems and process maps on top of this, but underneath it’s still the same journey. From cash out to cash back in again.

Which raises a question most businesses never ask explicitly.

What is the fastest way this journey could happen?

So let’s be deliberately uncomfortable for a moment.

Strip everything away.

·         No safety. Yep, no time-consuming machine guards, safety barriers or PPE.

·         No regulation.

·         No quality checks.

·         No approvals.

·         No handovers.

·         No rework.

·         No fixing what broke last night.

Just one objective: get from start to finish in the least possible time.

That path would be brutal. Unsafe. Illegal. Unsustainable.

We would never run a business that way.

But that’s precisely why it’s useful.

Because it shows us, unambiguously, what fast actually looks like when nothing else is allowed to get in the way. A straight line. A freakshow. A reference that exposes the physics of time without pretending it’s desirable.

On its own, it’s meaningless. But without it, everything that follows floats.

 The Essence

Now let’s bring reality back in.

Rules. Regulations. Safety. Quality. Capability. Capacity. The world as it is today, at least for most of us.

The Essence sits between fantasy and reality.

It’s not the straight line, and it’s not what we currently do.

It is the most time-effective way of making the journey at this point in time, given the conditions we actually operate under.

·         Not a target.

·         Not a future state.

·         A reference condition.

Without this, improvement discussions collapse into opinion. With it, time becomes something you can reason about rather than argue over.

The Timeline

Let’s now look at what actually happens: the real route that materials and cash take through the business. It’s shaped by decisions, priorities, constraints, breakdowns, batching, changeovers and recovery.

Nothing here looks outrageous and it definitely doesn’t feel negligent.

This is what most organisations will recognise as normal, or ‘business as usual’.

This is The Timeline. 

And that’s the problem.

Because the Timeline rarely looks broken. It just looks longer than it needs to be, but only when you have an ideal or standard to compare it with.  A notion of what should be happening. The harsh reality here is that we live and breathe the timeline day in day out and we often come to accept its quirks and pains as ‘the way things are around here.’

Drift

The gap between the Essence and the Timeline matters.

That gap is what I call Drift.

Not waste in the abstract and not poor discipline. But time that accumulates. Time that gets reused. Time that disappears into waiting, downtime, rework, fixes and workarounds.

As Drift builds, two things happen.

·         Costs rise and Margin erodes. People and assets spend more time recovering and ‘working around’ than creating value. Materials wait, get held up, get moved, or languish in stores the result of an over buy.

·         And capacity shrinks. The longer your Timeline, the less you can make in a given period. Revenue is constrained whether demand exists or not.

Cash, margin and revenue are all affected — not because anyone made a bad decision, (although that can happen – often) but because time was allowed to stretch without being seen.

This is where the abstraction stops. Let’s take a fictional example to talk the numbers, not just wiggly lines.

Take a familiar set of stages. Add up the days. The dark blue areas are what we plan to have in each zone or bucket, based on our demand, our strategy for buffering, and any Make to Stock requirements. For this period, we’d be pretty much on target if we were carrying around 66 days of materials across the system.

Theory is great, but look at where time actually pools. Our Timeline has expanded to cover a multitude of woes and as a result, we have pooled 75 days of inert cash/time/materials in our system.

What felt like a day here and a day there becomes weeks. What felt tolerable becomes structural.

Once you see it in numbers, the conversation changes.

It stops being about effort and intent and becomes about sequence, constraints and choice.

These go up to eleven…

Most leadership teams want the same three outcomes.

·         Stronger cash.

·         Better margins.

·         Higher revenue.

So targets get set. All of them. At once.

The problem isn’t ambition; it’s pretending the dials are independent. 

They aren’t.

When all three are pushed without addressing the Timeline underneath, time absorbs the strain. The wheels spin. The year starts in conflict.

This is how well-intentioned goal setting creates pressure instead of progress.

A way forward

I’ve written two books exploring this thinking: what the Timeline is, what the Essence represents, and why Drift is so hard to see from inside the system. A third, focused specifically on Drift, is in progress.

More importantly, there is a practical way of dealing with this.

·         You make time visible.

·         You decide what matters first. I’m a great believer in ‘tria facite’ – Do 3 Things.

·         And you realign the system so cash, margin and revenue stop fighting each other.

Not perfectly, and certainly not forever. But enough to restore control and momentum. When drift is reduced, performance follows.

This is how I work to remove lost time and realign cash, margin and revenue.

Davie Thomson