Getting your cadence right

Did you know that a heart attack isn’t just that your heart is beating too slow, but it can also be when your heart is beating too fast? If the heart is pumping too quickly, the blood stalls and doesn’t flow.

It can be just the same in setting the cadence for your governance.

You can kill a project or a committee by having a cadence that is too slow or too fast. Here I’ll use the language of project, but the same applies to any form of regular committee.

Too slow and there is not enough oversight with the tracking and control that it brings. Essentially the project is on remote control.

Too fast and the team is spending all its time getting the status aligned and reported accurately and not enough time on doing the work itself.

I think it is interesting that in most agile activity a sprint is two weeks in length. Not one week and not a month. I think this shows a sweet spot of creating an operating cadence which allows for work to be done, but with the right tracking and control.

You can imagine if the speed was weekly. For a lot of activity, that is just too fast and creates more effort in ‘managing’ the work than in ‘doing’ the work. But if it was monthly, that would be far too long a break between the visibility of progress and allowing for appropriate intervention if required.

As a practical example of evaluating cadence, at the beginning of the pandemic my team asked me to slow the cadence on some of our management activity and we did so, which allowed a bit more time to breathe and avoid the churn of ‘managing’.

A question I make sure I’m asking from time-to-time is whether the cadence is right.

I think leaders tend to set the tempo artificially fast. It gives an appearance of action orientation and active oversight, but I wonder if it sometimes makes more work in ‘managing’ the activity than in actually delivering the content.

It may be worth doing an experiment to slow your cadence on some of your activity and see whether you actually lose anything by doing so. The extra time you get back from not having to invest in reporting can be spent on delivering!

And a last observation, it is okay to change your cadence to match the situation. When all is tracking to plan, a longer timeframe may be acceptable. However, if the pressure is really on, step it up! Its okay to change your cadence to suit the environment.

All the best as you find the right pace across your portfolio of responsibilities and activities!