How late is late?
Erin Meyer, Professeur associé en sciences de gestion, INSEAD/The Conversation
Schedules, deadlines, time pressure… We are all painfully handcuffed to the notion of time. Scheduling is a state of mind that affects how you organise your day, how you run a meeting, how far you must plan in advance, and how flexible those plans are. Yet what is considered appallingly late in one culture may be acceptably on time in another.
Consider the morning you wake up to that harmonica sound from your iPhone reminding you about a meeting with a supplier on the other side of town at 9:15 a.m…. But your day has an unexpectedly chaotic start. Your toddler breaks a jar of raspberry jam on the floor and your older son accidentally steps in it, leading to several stressful minutes of cleanup. This is followed by a desperate search for the car keys, which finally turn up in the kitchen cupboard. You manage to drop the kids off at school just as the bells are ringing and the doors are closing. At that moment, your iPhone chimes 9:00 a.m., which means you’ll be about 6 or 7 minutes late for the important meeting—provided the crosstown traffic is no worse than usual.
What to do? You could of course call the supplier to apologise and explain that you will be arriving exactly at 9:21. Or possibly 9:22. Or you consider that 6 or 7 minutes late is basically on time. You decide not to call and simply pull your car out into traffic. And then perhaps you just don’t give the time any thought at all. Whether you arrive at 9:21 or 9:22 or even 9:45, you will still be within a range of what is considered acceptably on time, and neither you nor the supplier will think much of it.
In France, 7 minutes late is still on time
If you live in a linear-time culture like Germany, Scandinavia, the United States, or the UK, you’ll probably make the call. If you don’t, you risk annoying your supplier as the seconds tick on and you still haven’t shown up. On the other hand, if you live in France or northern Italy, chances are you won’t feel the need to make the call, since being 6 or 7 minutes late is within the realm of ‘basically on time’ (If you were running 12 or 15 minutes late, however, that would be a different story.)
And if you are from a flexible-time culture such as the Middle East, Africa, India, or South America, time may have an altogether different level of elasticity in your mind. In these societies, as you fight traffic and react to the chaos that life inevitably throws your way, it is expected that delays will happen. In this context, 9:15 differs very little from 9:45, and everybody accepts that.
When people describe those from another culture using words like inflexible, chaotic, late, rigid, disorganised, inadaptable, it’s quite likely the scheduling dimension is the issue.