Even a broken clock is right twice a day

My grandfather kept a box of broken watches above his rolltop desk.
Not heirlooms. Not sentimental artifacts. Just the cheap wristwatches people discard without a second thought, the kind that fail quietly in kitchen drawers and end up in a junk bowl beside rubber bands and unmatched keys.

He lifted the box down with a kind of reverence, as though it contained a small treasure.

“People throw things away before they understand them,” he said, sliding the box toward me. “Wrong is not the same as worthless.”

I was nine. My job was to listen.

He motioned for me to choose one. I picked a thin silver watch stuck at 4:17, late-afternoon tiredness suspended in place.

He nodded. “Good. Now imagine a lantern on the wall of your home. It glows green for exactly one minute each time the real time matches the time on that watch. Twice a day. Would it matter that the watch is wrong the rest of the time?”

I hesitated. Adults love questions they think are profound. Kids want clarity.

He smiled, seeing the pause. “Even if something is wrong more than ninety-nine percent of the time, can it still teach you something true?”

I shrugged — the only honest answer.

He tapped the watch face.

“That lantern would give you truth from an unreliable source. A one-minute sliver of accuracy in a sea of noise. If you can catch the moment the lantern turns green, you can orient your whole day around that flash of truth. You don’t need a perfect clock. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. You just need a reliable detection mechanism.”

I didn’t know it then, but he had just handed me the architecture of my adult life.

“When the world grows complicated — and it will — most people waste themselves trying to fix the broken clock. They think if the whole thing isn’t repaired, nothing in it is useful. But systems thinkers don’t need all the minutes to be right. They need to recognize the two minutes a day when it is.”

He paused. His pauses were thinking moments.

“You’ll hear people say you shouldn’t work with anything that's wrong 99.9% of the time and has only a 0.1% signal. Too noisy. Too unreliable. But they misunderstand the game. Noise isn’t the enemy. The ability to detect the signal is the whole game.”

That was the first time I heard the phrase he used for the rest of his life. I now call it The Broken Clock Doctrine.

The Broken Clock Doctrine: "Even a broken clock is right twice a day."
A flawed instrument can still be a precise teacher — if you build the system that detects the moment it’s right.

At nine, I understood maybe ten percent of it.
At nineteen, half.
At thirty, all of it.
By forty, I realized the doctrine explained entire industries.

Growing Up Into the Doctrine

I didn’t grow up to repair watches.
I grew up to navigate organizational systems — the kind where incentives collide, data contradicts itself, and leadership makes decisions inside fog, not clarity.

No one tells you this early in your career, but nearly everything in adult life is a broken clock.

Companies run on reporting cycles that don’t match today's reality.
Leaders operate on information that’s stale the moment it’s presented.
Teams coordinate using dashboards that hide more than they reveal.
Governments allocate budgets on forecasts built atop assumptions that expired years ago.
And people — the most complex clocks of all — move through the world with misaligned incentives and internal timing shaped by events they never discuss.

If you expect perfect clarity from any of these, you’ll live disappointed.
If you require perfection before you act, you’ll stall.
If you insist every clock must be fixed before you read it, you’ll act too late to matter.

But if you can detect the moment something aligns —
the one clean data point,
the one unguarded sentence that reveals true position,
the one behavior that repeats despite excuses,
the one market signal flickering through the noise —
you gain a kind of power the perfectly-instrumented thinkers never touch.

The Broken Clock Doctrine isn’t optimism.
It’s calibration within a sea of noise.

The Day the Doctrine Proved Itself

Years later, I sat in a strategy meeting at an airline, modeling the performance of a new cabin class, a hybrid between coach and business. Most believed it would produce middling gains. The math said otherwise.

The models were messy.
Data incomplete.
Forecasts contradictory.
Historical analogs pointing in opposite directions.

A young analyst whispered, “There’s too much noise. No way to get a clean answer.”

But I had my grandfather’s lantern.

Somewhere inside the data pits, despite the broken inputs, one signal repeated. A pattern that glowed green for a moment.

We went with it.

Eight months later, financial results blew past projections by hundreds of millions.
The broken clock had been right at the exact moment we needed it — and the detection mechanism, not the dataset, made the difference.

Why Most People Miss the Signal

There are two kinds of thinkers:

1. The Purists
They demand clarity before action.
They want the whole clock repaired before trusting even one minute.
They chase certainty like a child chasing a marble — head down, unaware of the room they’re in. Not calculating the opportunity cost of the time spent in the search.

2. The Structuralists
They know clarity is rare.
They know systems are noisy, incentives conflicting, information imperfect.
So they watch for alignment — a flash of signal — and act when it appears.

Purists drown in complexity.
Structuralists navigate it.

Purists rebuild clocks.
Structuralists read the minute that matters.

Purists treat noise as a wall.
Structuralists treat noise as terrain.

Broken Clocks in Modern Life

Once you see it, you see it everywhere:

A colleague wrong in every meeting, except the one insight that turns a project.
A market irrational for nine months, then suddenly coherent on the tenth.
A political system producing nonsense ninety percent of the time, but revealing real power dynamics in a procedural vote no one watches.
A teenager who resists every piece of advice but drops one sentence that tells you exactly what they need.
A dataset with thousands of corrupted rows but one column that never lies.

And then there are the personal clocks.
A man reaches for his wallet at a group dinner,
pauses, hand hovering, waiting for rescue.
A pantomime of generosity.
A red signal inside otherwise polite behavior.

The question is never:
“Is the clock broken?”
The question is:
“When is it right — and how will I know?”

The Lantern Is the Skill

My grandfather knew something it took me decades to work out:

The watch is irrelevant.
The lantern is the doctrine.

The detection mechanism — the ability to register alignment at the exact moment it appears — is the real instrument.

Some call it pattern recognition.
Some call it intuition.
Some call it experience.

In truth, it is a system built over time:

• sensitivity to micro-signals
• attention to repeated anomalies
• internal models that update in real time
• the ability to hold contradictory inputs without panic
• willingness to act on sparse but meaningful truth

This is the leadership skill people mistake for magic.

It isn’t magic. It’s the Broken Clock Doctrine, lived out.

The Doctrine in Today’s Fragile Systems

Noise is accelerating.
Data multiplies.
Contradictions proliferate.
Incentives pull in opposite directions.

Perfection is fiction.
Stability is episodic.
Clarity arrives in flashes.

In such a world, the person waiting for unambiguous signal loses.
The person able to catch truth in its brief appearances wins.

The world is not getting less noisy.
Which means the doctrine is not becoming optional.
It is becoming foundational.

What My Grandfather Really Gave Me

At nine, I thought he was teaching me about watches.
At nineteen, about thinking.
At thirty, about systems.
By forty, I realized he was teaching me agency.

You don’t need a clean world to make clean decisions.
You don’t need perfect data to see true patterns.
You don’t need fixed clocks to live on time.

You need a lantern bright enough to register the moment truth passes through the room.

Twice a day is enough.

Conclusion

The Broken Clock Doctrine is not about accepting dysfunction.
It’s about refusing paralysis in the presence of noise.

If you can detect alignment, even if it is fleeting, partial, imperfect, you can build strategy, lead teams, navigate uncertainty, steer markets, protect yourself, and design the next generation of human-scaled systems.

Wrong-almost-always is not the same as useless.
The doctrine is simple:

Catch the moment things are right — even if they’re broken the rest of the time.

My grandfather’s watches taught me that long before I had words for it.
I didn’t know it then.
But he was handing me the operating system of my life.

— Madonna Demir, author of Systems & Soul