The New Longitude
Synchronicity over distance
In 1714, the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act because ships were wrecking in the open ocean. They had maps of the coastlines, but they lacked a reliable clock to measure their position across shifting spaces.
Today, modern organizations are experiencing a new kind of spatial wreckage.
With the compression of standard time zones and the rise of distributed networks, Vancouver and Toronto are closer in time, but no closer in distance. We have plenty of communication tools, but we are missing a shared chronometer. Teams are working asynchronously across separate spaces, causing their data to fracture, their approvals to stall, and their operational records to drift apart.
Most business “process problems” are actually timing problems.
At Teck, the corporate AMEX system couldn’t talk to our travel app, and I couldn’t change either one. So every booking carried the AMEX reference number, and that number became our shared clock: any trip could be traced from request to approval to booking. Approvals moved about 30% faster. The tools didn’t change. The timing did.
When an organization tries to fit an industrial, 9-to-5 synchronous mindset into a fluid, digital landscape, the system breaks. I don’t just configure platforms like Power Apps or Dynamics 365. I anchor your team’s real, human rhythms to a single, unshakeable source of truth—building a digital chronometer that keeps your business on course, no matter how chaotic the surrounding environment becomes.
Is your team’s timing drifting apart? Tell me what’s happening, and we’ll look at it together.