The Pace Layers framework is a tool for understanding how complex systems work. The concept was first formulated by Stewart Brand in his Clock of the Long Now (01998) to describe how different components of civilization change at different speeds. It has since been applied to work in engineering, design, management, and education. 

The core of the Pace Layers framework is this: our world is composed of different components — some quickly changing, others glacial. The fast layers respond rapidly to shocks to the overall system, while the slow layers hold memory and stabilize those changes on longer time-scales. The different layers provide a “many-leveled corrective, stabilizing feedback throughout the system” when taken as a whole.

The layers are as follows, arranged from fastest to slowest:

• Fashion: Not just the world of couture and high art but what we consider “pop culture” and “trends” as well — the fastest moving, most ephemeral parts of our society, but also where innovations arise that can reshape all the underlying layers
• Commerce: Commerce acts a filtering force, taking the ephemeral moves of fashion and art and testing them against the sturdier bulwarks of the layers below it. Yet commerce itself requires limiting and regulation by those same forces; alone, it can only see so far.
• Infrastructure: The building of infrastructure is, in many ways, the first test of long-term thinking — any work of infrastructure or maintenance requires commitment on a temporal scale far longer than most artistic and commercial endeavors, but will support work both faster and slower than itself. Yet infrastructure itself requires support from long-lived institutions. 
• Governance: Good governance fosters the layers above it while keeping in mind the layers below it; bad governance ignores fast-moving changes and fails to perceive how conditions far older than any government inform the present moment. 
• Culture: Culture in the deep sense — the slow-moving forces of religion, language, and tradition. Here, things begin to move at rhythms longer than the human life-span; to change cultural dynamics is often a multi-generational challenge that can become quite messy if sped up.
• Nature: The natural world we live within moves so slowly that our own human concerns can often be made to seem irrelevant — but when nature changes quickly, either through natural disaster or our own anthropogenic disruptions, cataclysm beckons.