I was about three months into running marketing at Practo when someone on my team told me a brand awareness campaign would take six months before we'd see even five percentage points of movement on top-of-mind recall.

I didn't believe them.

I'd just come out of digital marketing — Google AdWords, conversion funnels, A/B tests with results in 48 hours. If something wasn't working, the numbers told you immediately. You adjusted. You moved. That was the game.

So when this person told me six months, my first instinct was: these people are slow. Maybe they're protecting their work. Maybe they just don't know how to move fast.

I was wrong. They were completely right. And it took me longer than I'd like to admit before I understood why.

Every function has a half-life — the minimum time between action and result. Not the time before things get good, but the time before you even know if what you're doing is working.

In operations, that half-life is hours to days. You change how a customer service queue is structured today, and the metrics shift tomorrow. You pull people out of a process, and you see pileups within a week. The feedback loop is short, fast, and tight. You can iterate at speed because the system tells you quickly when you're wrong.

That short feedback loop does something to you. It wires you for immediate results. It makes you impatient with anything that doesn't signal back quickly. After enough years in operations, you can't really help it — your brain has been trained to expect a response.

Marketing is different. Even in digital marketing — which I'd argue is the most operationally-minded corner of the function — you need at minimum two weeks of data before you can say anything with confidence. And that's the fast part. Brand building, awareness campaigns, positioning work — six months is the floor, not the ceiling. You put energy in for months before you know whether you're moving the needle. The people who are good at this don't just tolerate that lag. They've built their entire way of working around it. They've learned to run without confirmation.

HR is something else entirely. In HR, the half-life is measured in years. A compensation policy you change today will show its real effects three, four years from now — when the promoted employees start comparing themselves to the market, when the good ones leave, when you're left with the people who couldn't find a better offer. A leadership development program you start this quarter won't prove itself until you see what kind of managers it produced in year five. There are decisions in HR that are functionally one-way doors: you make them, and the consequences arrive long after the decision-maker has moved on.

I learned this most vividly when I had to hire my successor as HR head. I was moving to a P&L role and needed someone to take over.

What I found, early in the search, was that almost every candidate had moved companies every three years. And the answers I got from them were surface-level. Ask about long-term policy thinking and you'd get textbook responses. Ask about second and third-order effects of a comp decision and you'd get a blank stare dressed up in confident language.

Then I started talking to people who had stayed in one place for five, six, seven years. Different answers entirely. They'd say things like: "If you do X, in year three you'll see Y — because this is what happened when we tried something similar in 2019." Non-obvious, specific, connected to time.

The insight behind the insight was this: someone who has spent five or more years in an HR head role has actually faced the consequences of their own decisions. They made a policy call in year one. Year three arrived and either validated it or punished it. They had to live with both. That's the only real school for HR. Not three years at five different companies — three companies across fifteen years.

I stopped interviewing anyone with less than five years in HR Head’s role. It narrowed the pool dramatically. It also found me the right person.

The warning I'd give anyone planning a cross-functional move — especially from a fast-feedback function to a slow one — has two parts.

The first is obvious once you've felt it: don't import your clock into the new function and call the locals slow. They're not slow. They've calibrated to a different half-life. The ops person who walks into HR and says "why can't we just decide and move?" doesn't understand that in HR, deciding and moving without thinking through the third-order consequences is exactly how you create the disasters that land on your successor four years later. The HR person isn't being cautious because they're timid. They're being cautious because they've seen what happens when someone wasn't.

The second warning is less obvious and more dangerous: if you move into a function with a long half-life and you get promoted fast, you are in trouble unless you have experienced people around you.

In operations, a young team figures it out. They test, they fail, they adjust in days. The cost of a bad decision is low because the feedback arrives quickly and the correction is cheap. In HR, a young team is a liability. You make a decision at thirty-two that a sixty-year-old HR head would recognize as a time-bomb, but there's nobody in the room who's ever seen that particular bomb go off. In ops, a young team can iterate its way to competence. In HR, the function itself won't let you — the feedback arrives too late for trial and error to save you. You need people who have actually run through the full cycle, not people who've cycled quickly through many companies.

The move across functions is one of the most underestimated transitions in a career. Everyone talks about the subject matter expertise you'll need to build. Almost nobody talks about the rhythm adjustment.

Your function programmed your expectations. It trained you on how fast the world should respond. It calibrated your patience, your instincts, your sense of whether things are moving or stuck.

When you cross into a different function, that programming doesn't reset automatically. You have to reset it deliberately. You have to learn to read the locals not as slow or fast, but as running on a different time signature — one that's exactly right for the terrain they work in.

The traveler who arrives in a new city and complains that everyone wakes up too late is not insightful. They're jet-lagged.

Not the only way. Probably not even the best way. Just one practitioner's version that worked.

~Discovering Turiya@work@life