This paper presents a framework for reasoning about ‘timely response’, and control versus the temporal organisation of a controlling system. By three empirical examples, we show how a controlling system can be described in terms of perception points, decision points and action points. Our conclusions are that (1) temporal expectancies shape our ability to exercise control at least as much our ability to understand relations and causality, but temporality is rarely part of approaches to modelling human or system performance, (2) temporal organisation of activities shape our ability to exercise control, (3) by utilising the temporal control framework, we can describe important properties of the temporal organisation of a socio-technical system, and (4) the capacity of modelling is limited to what can be known or imagined. Therefore, models describing resilience or stability should include temporality and be based on frameworks generic enough to be applied to a wide variety of situations.