Clockspeed Balancing
Commercial strategy changes in months, the product supply chain in a year, the network in years. Clockspeed Balancing is a management flight simulator for that conflict: you steer a company for 20 years, one quarter at a time, and see how every gap between the three wears down the slow, inertial parts of the company that no one decides on directly.
What it does
- Three levels of decisionsCommercial strategy (price, service promise, promotions, launches, markets), the product supply chain (inventory cover, flexible capacity, dual sourcing, an improvement programme) and the network (building, closing and automating capacity by region), each taking effect at its own speed.
- The inertial companyOperational capability, trust between functions, supplier relationships, customer perception and expectations, product-range complexity, sunk assets and cash, all moving slowly and all affected by misfit.
- WeatherSix scenarios, from calm skies to an innovation wave, Eastern growth, a promise war, a storm of disruption and tariffs, and all of them at once. The briefing gives each one's range; a flight draws its own timing and size from it, with noisy demand, so you learn the real path as you fly.
- A cockpitGauges, fit bars for each level, advisories in plain words, a radar of decisions still in flight, the regions, and 20-year history charts. Undo, autosave, flight files, and a landing scored on net present value against holding the starting course and an aligned autopilot, both flying the same weather, then a debrief that replays the flight one strategy level at a time to show which clock made or cost the money.
How it is built
The model is a system dynamics model in the tradition of Sterman's management flight simulators: two product segments in three regions, market shares driven by attractiveness, customers who notice failures faster than recoveries and whose expectations ratchet up with every promise, capacity built through a 30-month pipeline, and a capability that firefighting erodes and, past a point, traps. Competitors match price cuts but not rises, customers punish unreliability more than they reward reliability beyond what they are used to, innovative stock goes obsolete, and automation makes capacity rigid, so no strategy set once beats steering. Its tests check a steady state that holds for 20 years, exact accounting, the three clock speeds (about 6, 11 and 33 months), and the conflicts it exists to show: the promise ratchet, the cost of an unsupported commercial push, the value of pacing, the capability trap and the way out of it, complexity creep and resilience. They also search for free lunches: no lever moved once in calm skies gains more than 2%, and steering beats any strategy set once wherever the weather changes the business. Everything runs in your browser. The name follows Charles Fine's Clockspeed (1998).
Author
Clockspeed Balancing was designed and built by Daniel Alberto Sepulveda Estay, PhD, founder of Estay Dynamics. He works on system dynamics and network optimisation for supply chain resilience. He holds a PhD from the Technical University of Denmark and an MSc from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a council member of the System Dynamics Society.
To cite: Sepulveda Estay, D. A. (2026). Clockspeed Balancing: a strategy flight simulator (version 1.2.0) [Software]. https://kathuman.github.io/claude-projects/clockspeed/