A lot of people confuse masculine with male and feminine with female, and that is quite misleading. At their core masculine and feminine are energetic polarities. And if you have been exploring my writing for a while I’d also have you believe that THE feminine is a bit more than merely a polarity – it is also the source of all creation. But that’s another discussion.

On occasion I use synonyms when describing masculine and feminine energy. Perhaps the easiest to comprehend is that THE feminine is relational. It is of the source, by the source and forever remains connected to the source. So when we explore the language of THE feminine we state in unambiguous terms that this thing only exists in communion with something else, ultimately as part of an indivisible whole. Nothing is entirely separate. Its meaning emerges through relationship. Anyway, enough of the semantics. Let’s bring this into a practical conversational piece.

Time and money are inescapable realities of modern business. They are also routinely used as surrogates for each other and conflated with measurements of value. We spend time. We save time. We waste time. We invest time. We buy time. Time is money. Equally, money becomes a convenient proxy for value, contribution, importance and sometimes even human worth. Salary becomes a measure of success. Revenue becomes a measure of organisational significance. An hourly rate becomes a measure of expertise. We have become extraordinarily accustomed to quantifying things and then assuming the quantity tells us something about their value.

Our everyday business parlance has masculine and feminine language bias embedded into it. Consider something as commonplace as employment. We talk of labour hire and employment as full-time, part-time or even casual. Note that these terms are what I would call feminine in that they are relational or relative. They are not absolute measures in the way a masculine description might be. Part-time only makes sense in relation to full-time. “Full” itself only makes sense because we have collectively decided what constitutes a full working week. A masculine description might instead be hours, units or dollars: 38 hours, five days, $2,000, forty units. Measures that are discrete, defined and designed to stand alone.

That distinction is subtle but important. One way of thinking tells us how much. Another tells us in relation to what. Neither is inherently better. The interesting question is which one we habitually privilege, particularly in business.

When we talk about money we routinely describe it as more, less, enough, rich, poor, surplus, deficit, expensive or cheap. All of these relative terms I would call feminine. They exist in relation to another variable. More than what? Less than what? Rich compared with whom? Expensive relative to what? Enough for what purpose? A person earning $100,000 can simultaneously be rich, poor, adequately paid or underpaid depending entirely upon the relationship against which that number is considered.

Even enough is an intriguing word. Enough sounds like a quantity, but it isn’t really. There is no universal number called enough. Enough only exists in relation to need, expectation, desire, circumstance or purpose. What is enough today may not be enough tomorrow. What is enough for one person may be abundance for another and scarcity for someone else. Enough is not an amount. It is a relationship. Ultimately, enough is a decision.

We even formalise this relational quality in accounting and governance through the concept of materiality. An amount does not become material simply because it reaches some universally prescribed number. Material to whom? Material in relation to what? Materiality requires context. The number may be masculine in its precision; its significance is relational.”

Integers are another example. They exist as static points of measurement. 1. 2. 10. 100. We like integers because they give us certainty. They allow us to count, compare, rank and measure. But there is a whole dynamic range between these integers. Between 1 and 2 lies 1.1, 1.01, 1.001 and effectively an infinity of possible points. The apparently empty space between two integers isn’t empty at all.

And poignantly, we use symbols to describe relationships around these points. < > + − are all symbolic representations of conditions that are not simply the fixed number itself. Less than. Greater than. Adding to. Taking from. The moment we move away from the fixed point we require a language of relationship.

The fixed points are easy to measure. The relationship between them is where things start moving.

Perhaps that distinction matters more than we realise. Business has become extraordinarily accomplished at measuring the points. Revenue. Profit. Headcount. Hours. Market share. Productivity. Utilisation. Share price. Units sold. Customer numbers. We construct dashboards filled with them. We establish KPIs around them. We compare this quarter with last quarter and this year with last year.

But what about the space between them?

What happened between $1 million and $2 million?

What happened between employee number 100 and employee number 200?

What happened between a customer satisfaction score of six and a score of eight?

What happened between 8.00am and 5.00pm?

The numbers tell us that something changed. They do not necessarily tell us what happened. They tell us where we were and where we arrived. They are much less capable of describing the relationships, interactions, conversations, decisions, failures, adaptations and moments of insight through which the change actually occurred.

The same is true for time. There are two useful ways of thinking about its measure — Chronos, quantitative or clock time, and Kairos, qualitative time. Chronos is sequential. It can be counted. Seconds become minutes, minutes become hours, hours become days. Kairos describes something entirely different: the opportune moment, the appropriate moment, the moment at which conditions are right for something to occur.

Chronos asks: What time is it?

Kairos asks: Is it time?

One answer might be 10.37am.

The other might simply be: Ready.

That distinction is profound because “ready” has no fixed unit of measurement. You cannot necessarily determine readiness by looking at a clock. A person may be ready before the deadline or unready after it. An idea may mature in an afternoon or take ten years. A market may be technically available but not ready. A conversation can occur at the scheduled time and still happen at entirely the wrong moment.

Modern business overwhelmingly privileges Chronos. Deadlines. Timesheets. Billable hours. Quarterly reporting periods. Meeting durations. Project schedules. Financial years. Tenure. Years of experience. We measure time relentlessly because time appears objective and therefore manageable.

Then something even more interesting happens. We attach moral meaning to those measurements.

Busy becomes important.

Fast becomes competent.

Early becomes diligent.

Late becomes irresponsible.

Idle becomes lazy.

We have taken a unit of measurement and quietly turned it into a measure of human value.

A coach might tell us they have completed 1,000 hours of coaching. A consultant might tell us they have twenty years of experience. An executive might tell us they work seventy hours a week. Each statement is quantitative. But none necessarily tells us anything about quality. One thousand hours could represent extraordinary mastery or the same hour repeated one thousand times. Twenty years of experience might represent twenty years of learning or one year of learning repeated twenty times.

Time is an input. It is not necessarily an output.

There is another conception of time that our everyday language already understands perfectly well. We talk about the time it takes. The right time. When the conditions are right. When someone is ready. When an idea has matured. When something has run its course. When the time comes. In good time. In the fullness of time.

These expressions are inherently relational. Their meaning cannot be separated from context. They describe not the quantity of time that has passed but the relationship between time, circumstance and readiness.

Perhaps what fascinates me most, then, is not the points themselves but the space between them. Between beginning and ending. Between knowing and not knowing. Between one identity and another. Between the old and the new. Between death and rebirth.

This time gap between events can be depicted beautifully by the slowly moving hands of a clock. Powderfinger captured something of this in These Days:

It’s coming ’round again The slowly creeping hand Of time and its command It settles in its place Its shadow in my face Puts pressure in my day Soon enough it comes Here it is again The slowly creeping hand Of time and its command Soon enough it comes And settles in its place Its shadow in my face

The song continues that image of time settling into place and casting its shadow across the day. I find the metaphor particularly interesting because the hand itself isn’t exerting pressure. The clock doesn’t care. We do. We have taken the movement of a hand around a dial and constructed an entire architecture of expectation around it. The slowly creeping hand measures Chronos. The pressure we experience arises from our relationship with it.

Curiously, this gap between moments, and particularly between death and rebirth, is explored in Tibetan Buddhism. It is called the bardo, an intermediate or transitional state. The Tibetan term is commonly associated in the West with the period between death and rebirth, but the broader idea is that existence contains transitional states in which one condition has ended and another has not yet fully emerged.

Traditional accounts of the post-death journey describe a progression through distinct bardos. There is the Bardo of the Moment of Death, in which the physical and mental faculties dissolve and consciousness encounters what is described as the Clear Light. There is the Bardo of Reality, associated with experiences and appearances arising after death. And there is the Bardo of Becoming, the transitional movement toward another existence and rebirth. The traditional framework can describe this post-death transition as lasting up to 49 days.

Whether one approaches that literally, spiritually, philosophically or simply as metaphor, I find the underlying concept fascinating: there is a state between states.

Western business thinking is remarkably uncomfortable with that proposition.

We like beginnings and endings. Targets and outcomes. Before and after. Problem and solution. Current state and future state. Strategy and execution. Hire date and termination date. Start date and completion date. We put milestones on project plans precisely because milestones allow us to turn movement into points.

We like the measurable points.

But transformation does not necessarily occur at either end.

It occurs between them.

There is a period in which the old thing has ceased to be, but the new thing has not yet fully become. Anyone who has undergone significant personal or organisational change understands this intuitively. The old identity no longer fits, yet the new identity isn’t established. The old strategy has been abandoned, yet the new strategy isn’t working. The previous career has ended, yet the next one hasn’t begun. The old way of thinking has been questioned, yet the new understanding has not crystallised.

We often treat this space as a problem.

We call it uncertainty.

Ambiguity.

Delay.

Downtime.

Transition.

A gap.

We rush to close it.

But perhaps the gap is where the transformation is actually taking place.

Perhaps it cannot always be hurried, measured or managed.

This brings us back to time and money. Money can be counted. Time can be counted. People can be counted. Outputs can be counted. These are the fixed points we have become extraordinarily good at measuring.

But value is relational.

Enough is relational.

Readiness is relational.

Opportunity is relational.

Transformation is relational.

And relationship itself cannot be understood entirely by measuring its component parts.

Much of my work is predicated on THE RISE OF THE FEMININE, but there is a whole unconscious language bias we either use or refrain from using that points to its everyday application. What I discuss here are but a few examples.

The interesting possibility is that THE feminine is not something we need to introduce into business. It is already there. It is embedded in our language. It appears whenever we move from absolute to relative, from quantity to quality, from the isolated thing to the relationship between things.

It is hidden between our measurements.

Perhaps we have simply trained ourselves not to see it because we have become so preoccupied with what can be counted.

We count the hours. We count the dollars. We count the people. We count the outputs. We count the years. We count the points.

And all the while, something is happening in between.

We count the points.

THE feminine may be found in the space between them.