Shift your organisation’s cadence

Your workplace has rhythms, whether you control them, are controlled by them, or just live alongside them. Why do we pay so little attention to time as something to optimise?

?Rhythms of work include

• ?Yearly: AGM, Business Planning performance goals/reviews
• Quarterly: budget replanning, the all-staff town hall
• Monthly: Project meetings, a 1:1 with your manager
• Weekly: Standups with your team, last week’s revenue
• The weird ones: Board or committee meetings that might be every six weeks except December but also two in August. You know them.

When we join an organisation, we tend to just slot into these. Even CEOs often just accept the order of things, and work within existing rhythms. But rhythms at work aren’t a force of nature, they are set by humans. They can be changed by humans too…

• A new CEO in an organisation stricken with stasis moved the Executive’s meeting from Thursdays to Mondays, and made it start the week with?drive?rather than respond to the week with?defence
• A Board Chair that re-sequenced Committees: ordering the calendar to tackle Strategy, then Risk, then Finance made the Board meeting use strategic purpose, not dollars, as its wellspring.
• A Project Director, watching people have better ideas and reversing decisions the week?after?the approval meeting, created a pre-approval ‘discussion’ before the ‘approval meeting’. Making sign-off two beats rather than one — a pair of quavers, not a crotchet — made the decision sticky.

Example 1: Monthly-ing the Executive

I was part of an Exec team that had gone through lots of change, and had an interventionist Board. The group had a ‘stand-up’ Monday meeting, and sessions called for other reasons (‘strategy’, ‘budget’). Staff feedback was that they weren’t sure what the Exec did in these meetings, or how and when to interact with it. And it wasn’t always clear what value it added for the organisation. Exec members feeling productive doesn’t constitute creating value for the org. I got a bee in my bonnet and did some research and re-engineering with my colleagues. We landed here:

?Benefits:

• Reduced the cognitive burden of endless mindset shifts. Exec aren’t trying to fix detail and consider innovation at the same time
• Clarity for staff: Urgent? Monday. Big stuff? Strategy meeting
• CEO not deep in operational discussion — accountability to the Exec
• CEO drives what matters: Strategy and urgency
• Flexibility is planned in: the system doesn’t break when an issue doesn’t fit the model, which maintains faith in the model

?Example 2: Changing the beat of planning processes

When I joined Museums Victoria in 2013, there was an exhibition planning process that didn’t work. While the stated goal was to plan the program taking into account strategy, curatorial vision, staff capacity and space availability, it achieved mostly paperwork, and pushed decisions into the wrong place.

The process was to first discuss whether there was capacity to do an idea, then discuss whether the idea?should?be done. What that meant was the capacity meeting (around twenty people) and its scarcity mindset ended up shaping the creative conversation. Clearly this was unacceptable so the capacity conversation was routinely ignored, storing up downstream issues for delivery teams.

The key shift I made was to start with a much smaller group to make the creative decisions first, and only then?explore how the idea could be done. This is a huge simplification — anyone who’s worked in a state-run org of more than three people can tell! — but the relevant point here was changing the order of the gateways made the resource managers more able to give a reasoned response , and so better able to be heard. Planning improved! Idea first, resourcing second — made possible by changing the sequence.

Cadence

Why do bicycles have gears? Seems like a trivial question, but it is not. Gears decouple the physiological (how to exert power efficiently) from the environment (is there a headwind, is there a hill?). Effort is not directly related to velocity.

When there is a crisis, or an urgent deadline approaches, we often try to increase the rate of meetings. “I need an update every morning”, says the CEO. But does pedalling harder get us there faster? Similarly, I’ve seen strategy development or major project planning be stretched out to ‘give everyone time to think’. This isn’t what happens. People will generally give the issue the time they can spare, whether it is an hour after you email them or an hour a fortnight later, just before the meeting. Does this ‘thinking time’ create better thinking? I don’t think it does.

And the cognitive load of multiple tasks decreases our effectiveness. We can choose to do two tasks over a week, or eight tasks over a month. The former will be more effective.

So with cadence, it’s helpful to consider

• Do we need more frequent interactions? (Do I need them, do my team need them?)
• What is the message you might be sending by wanting to meet more frequently (Is it saying I don’t trust you? Or is it saying I am actively supporting you?
• What is more important in completing the work – time or quality? Does the cadence I’m setting reflect that?
• What other rhythms exist that interact with this activity? (If reports to the grant-giver are due quarterly, do we need to review progress any more often that that? Why?)

The time to get to an outcome might not match the rhythm of the project. Meeting weekly feels different for a project concluding within a quarter compared to a project that concludes in three years. (Cyclists hate long shallow hills more than short steep ones!)

Most of all, am I judging how we are going by the outcome or the effort? I might pedal really hard into a headwind (success is making any progress at all!) or pedal slowly down a hill very fast (the CRM I invested in is doing all the work for me!). Acknowledging the effort as well as the progress of yourself and your team is important.

Rhythm and staff wellbeing

All of the above are about effectiveness — getting better things done, better. But i want to call out the wellbeing aspects of giving some certainty over the rhythm of the organisation. For many people, a predictable work environment is a safe and productive one. In both museums and NFPs, i’ve seen a toxic attachment to the idea that ‘spontaneity’ creates innovation; that structuring activities through time is somehow constricting of individual genius. I’m sure there’s people for whom that’s true. But leaving aside the valorisation of individual genius, the most effective people I know work their best with some sort of timeblocking. It creates psychological safety, reducing health and safety risks, and enables people to work at their best.?And collective intelligence beats individual brilliance every time – creating the right rhythm to enable that is critical to get the benefits.

At an aggregate level, having clear rhythms means people are in the same ‘mode’ so teams can mesh with each other effectively. I’ve worked with ‘admin fridays’, where everyone went pretty internal on their own inbox to start the week fresh. The CFO enabled that by never scheduling meetings that day — so the Finance team were available to help as teams faced finance challenges.

Some teams, eg front of house and catering, have a daily rhythm. Some are subject to very sudden shifts in their rhythm — responsive facilities services, for example. Still others have a rhythm that puts workload and stress at specific times — end of the month for finance, Board paper deadline at Executive. It’s necessary for other teams to understand this and be compassionate. But it’s also necessary to build these in. Make everyone aware, through a healthy culture where time and the rhythms of work are spoken about.

Fin

The quick version of this newsletter is treat ‘time and rhythm’ with the same care and respect as you treat ‘structure of department’ or ‘allocation of desk spaces’.

See you next bi-week. If you’re minded to tap out a rhythm on the “like” button please do; an odd number would be preferable!

?

Paul.