Organizations face multiple competing temporal demands: they must act with urgency while strategizing for the long term or respond to immediate pressures while preparing for an uncertain future. My research explores how organizations make sense of and actively manage these tensions, what I call temporal complexity. For example, I study how sustainable startups balance their long-term vision with the need to scale quickly, or how teams resist harmful acceleration in favor of more reflexive, purposeful pacing. This work highlights temporal design as a critical leadership capacity in the age of polycrisis.

Organizations frequently create work environments that undermine both their own declared goals and the wellbeing of their members: digitally mediated, seductive, and always-on settings in which constant availability becomes expected, overwork normalized, and the boundaries between work and life increasingly porous. My research examines how such working time regimes emerge, why they prove so tenacious, and what it would take to change them. For example, I study why excessive working hours — from sixty-hour weeks in professional services to 120-hour weeks in investment banking — persist despite mounting evidence of their costs for health, families, gender equality, and long-term productivity, and why individual, organizational, and regulatory countermeasures so often fail. This work reframes working time as a contested and negotiated organizational regime, constituted at multiple levels of analysis and in need of deliberate design.

What does it take for organizations to become ecologically and socially sustainable? My research examines how organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into everyday practices, often while facing economic pressures to deliver short-term results. I explore how leaders and teams navigate the tensions between future-oriented transformation and historical path dependence, and how sustainability initiatives are shaped by digital technologies and their implementation. This includes studying how digital technologies support or undermine sustainability transitions, and how organizations can manage sustainability without simply reinforcing the status quo. The goal is to better understand what it takes to make sustainability both actionable and transformative in complex organizational settings.

Technologies like artificial intelligence, simulation models, and video-conferencing are reshaping how we collaborate and strategize. I investigate how these technologies influence organizational communication, knowledge-based practices, risk work, and power relations in organizations. My research shows how digital technologies are inscribed with hidden assumptions that shape decision-making and accountability, while also reconfiguring the rhythmic and relational fabric of organizational life. For instance, the shift to hybrid or remote work alters not only how people experience connectivity but can also reinforce existing power asymmetries. This line of research helps organizations to better understand the “people side” of new and emerging technologies, and how to approach them in a ethical and reflexive way.

From agile teams to online communities and coworking spaces, many organizations are experimenting with alternative or decentralized, less-hierarchical forms of organizing. My research explores how these forms of organizing influence collaboration and wellbeing at work. I examine, for instance, how agile teams manage competing priorities over time and how coworking spaces function as semi-informal “surrogate” organizations that blend community with subtle forms of discipline and control. My studies show that new organizational forms can afford flexibility and creativity, but also bring hidden costs, such as overwork or informal hierarchies.

Innovation is central not only to how organizations adapt and renew themselves, but also how they address the pressing social and technological challenges of our time, from digital transformation to sustainability transitions. Yet managing innovation is far from straightforward: it requires organizations to break with established routines while drawing on accumulated knowledge, and to coordinate distributed activities across social, spatial and temporal boundaries. My research examines how organizations navigate these challenges, with particular attention to the temporal dimensions that shape innovation processes. For example, I study how actors leverage pacing and timing to advance new ideas, navigating the tension between speed-based regimes of acceleration, such as innovation accelerators, hackathons, and agile methods, and emerging counter-movements around "slow innovation" that emphasize reflection, learning, and care. This work reframes innovation not as a linear pipeline or a singular breakthrough, but as an ongoing, distributed process in which organizational pasts, presents, and futures are continually reinterpreted, and in which managing the rhythms and horizons of innovation becomes a core strategic task.