Hack your organisation’s rhythms

What do best practice for Agile projects, Board governance and project management have in common, that no-one talks about? Managing through rhythm. Here are some tips and tricks for applying time as a lens for making work better.

Your workplace has rhythms, whether you control them, are controlled by them, or just live alongside them.

• 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 org, we tend to just slot into these. Even CEOs often just accept the order of things, and focus on re-writing plans and hiring/firing to get stuff changed.

But I’ve seen rhythm applied as a tool to great effect.

• A new CEO in an org 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.

How? There’s a lot of good practice i’ll just assume here — meetings have a reason, there’s an agenda and someone’s chairing it. I’ll talk in detail about a couple of examples.

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

How did i build it? I had a discovery phase, where I asked people what they needed from Exec meetings and monitored what was discussed at the existing meetings. This built some momentum for change — part of which is helping people see that change is possible. Meetings aren’t a force of nature, they’re set by humans. I trusted my gut feeling that the jibing between types of issues wasn’t helping us and seperated the types of issues. Once I’d thought about what frequency was needed, i tested with peers and staff. When they generally agreed, I took it to the CEO who had a great attitude to giving things a go; we noted that if it didn’t work we could iterate again.

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 and staff and spatial capacity, it achieved mostly paperwork, and pushing 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 a scarcity mindset ended up shaping the creative conversation. Clearly this was unnaceptable so the capacity conversation was routinely ignored, storing up downstream issues for delivery teams.

The key shift was to shrink the planning process down to a much smaller group first to make creative programming decisions, then work the idea up a little 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.

Idea first, resourcing second — made possible by changing the sequence.

Example 3: Build time for a sequence of activity, don’t compress

I’ve previously written on improving quality checking and approval processes. I didn’t highlight the time aspect.

Without re-hashing the process, I just want to draw attention to the time and rhythm. There are nine discrete steps in this review and approval process. These allow for stakeholders to get deep into the project: reflection, discussion, circling back around issues. The resulting alignment of the organisation for the next stage of work — after Compliance and Creative have all been given time and attention, been heard seriously and transparently — is worth the time.

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 valoration 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 (mornings?).

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.

Concluding

Quite enough time on this post already. If i could summarise this into one point it’s this: treat ‘time and rhythm’ with the same care and respect as you treat ‘structure of department’ or ‘allocation of desk spaces’.

PS — on meetings

A lot of this is about shaping meetings, and there’s a lot of suspicion around workplaces that meetings are somehow not real work. I just want to call out this amazing piece by Elizabeth Ayer, The meetings are the work , dealing with that nonsense far better than i could.