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A Critical but Often Neglected Dimension of KM

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You’ve probably heard stories such as these. A veteran ER physician senses that a reportedly “stable” patient is about to go critical, well before the change is detected by the monitors. A veteran pilot decides to abort a landing at precisely the right moment, while another mistimes that critical window and crashes. The seasoned negotiator allows the silence in the room to endure precisely long enough to induce the other side to compromise.

In searching for ways to improve decision making in these types of situations, the first reaction is often: “We need more data!” While more data never hurts, what’s really needed is a deeper understanding of distinctively human senses like timing and anticipation. That knowledge can’t be downloaded, documented, or captured in a database.

Much of our legacy KM practices have focused on treating knowledge as content to be captured, shared, and applied as needed. But what has become foundational in today’s complex, fast-changing world is the need for a more complete representation of knowledge in the time periods before, during, and after its emergence and application. Introducing epistemological temporality.

What This Means and Why It’s Important

We can view epistemological temporality as the two-way street between what we know and how we know it (the epistemic part) and how we experience time (the temporal). Our current technology-saturated world shrinks time cycles into trillionths of a second. Much of our deep knowledge, where the needed wisdom often resides, runs on human time and can’t be rushed. When we ignore that mismatch, we don’t just feel busier and more burned out—we tend to make rash decisions, mistaking information for understanding. Sound familiar, generative AI (GenAI) users? Not to mention that hard-won, critical sense of timing that’s been walking out the door with your best people.

Simply stated, epistemological temporality is the understanding of how the various components of time, pace, rhythm, duration, and structure of past, present, and future shape knowledge across the traditional KM lifecycle. Even during those seemingly rare gestalt “aha!” moments, knowing is rarely instantaneous. Rather, it tends to unfold slowly and accretively, woven over lifetimes of human experiences, perceptions, and expectations. In short, time isn’t the neutral backdrop against which we come to know things. Rather, it’s an active ingredient.

Thirteen Ways of Knowing Time

You can learn more about this fascinating subject, and have fun while doing so, in a remarkable new book, The Haze of Time: The Recursive Dance of Knowledge and Temporality (MQIPress, 2026) by Alex Bennet and Robert Turner. (I was honored to write the foreword.) The authors examine time through 13 disciplinary lenses, including physics, phenomenology, neuroscience, anthropology, philology, and culture, showing that each way of knowing time actively constructs a different temporal world.

Many of their insights are steeped in paradox. For starters, knowledge requires time, but it also transforms time. Even more paradoxically, temporal knowledge often yields less temporal wisdom. Think about that for a minute (at least!). We’ve never known more about productivity, attention, and circadian rhythms. Yet we suffer more than ever from sleep deprivation, fractured focus, and chronic time-scarcity. We’re actually optimizing in the wrong direction. The future keeps outrunning us, when we need to be getting out in front.

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