When we hear the word rhythm, we automatically think of music. But rhythm is much more than a component of music. It can be found everywhere once you start looking: both in nature (tidal cycle, migration of birds, change of seasons, animal rhythms), and within our body (heartbeat, breath, brainwaves, speech, circadian rhythm). It is such a universal concept that has become almost invisible to most of us.

We all have an internal sense of rhythm. It connects us to the world. It helps us synchronise with others. You cannot stay in your own time signature when you are truly present with someone. The body synchronises before the mind decides to. Anyone who dances appreciates this deeply.

We are all in a continuous dance, in a dynamic balance. The back-and-forth of the rhythm is what lets energy move through a system without the system collapsing. It is what keeps the system alive, protecting it against entropy and disorder.

Organisational Rhythms

In organisations when we hear the word structure we tend to think about org charts, hierarchies, reporting lines, teams, and established processes. We tend to view everything in static terms. Those feel like the structure that helps organise work.

But if we look close to well-functioning teams and organisations there is something else going on underneath that is way more interesting.

An org chart is just a snapshot, the rhythms of people is what actually makes an organisation come to life. In well-functioning organisations, what you’ll find underneath an org chart is a set of rhythms: who talks to whom and how often, decisions that happen at pace, conflict that gets surfaced and resolved frequently, teams that deliver at cadence.

A team that has lost its cadence, its sense of when to push and when to rest, is already in entropy. You can see the dysfunction before anything visibly breaks.

Rhythm is not the output of structure. Rhythm is the structure.

Why Traditional Plans Never Worked

For many years organisations have run projects and programs from fixed plans, a Gantt chart locked at the start and defended to the end.

The assumption always was that reality holds still. That you can take a snapshot of a complex system, plan against it, and execute. But systems don’t hold still. Organisations have rhythms and the plans that ignored this failed because they treated a living system as though it were dead.

But a complex system, like any living organism, is always moving, always adapting. Without rhythm people and teams interact in random ways, workflow gets disrupted, everything feels out of sync.

A plan taken at one moment is already out of date by the time it’s approved. And then we spend all our energy throughout the programme to maintain the illusion of control rather than responding to reality. While we are busy doing this, entropy is increasing.

The outcome is noise.

Cadence-Based Planning

Donella Meadows, author of “Limits to Growth” and “Thinking in Systems” says that before you disturb a complex system, like an organisation, in any way, first get the beat of the system. Watch how it behaves. This prevents you from falling into ‘predict, control, or impose your will’ solutions without having paid any attention to what the system is doing and why.

To take it a step further, organisations do not have one beat but are polyrhythmic, like Cuban Music. It is hard for someone to listen to and distinguish all the different beats. But at the heart of the Afro-Cuban music there is a rhythmic pattern called the Clave. It is played on a pair of wooden sticks and it is literally two bars, five notes, and nothing else. The clave doesn’t tell the other instruments what to do. It just holds the pattern that everything else orients around, even when the other parts are moving in completely different directions.

It is the underlying pattern that makes everything else make sense.

Cadence-based plan looks more like a music score, it has an underlying beat that connects all instruments. But like a music score it is also silent when it sits on a sheet of paper until it is performed by the program team. Every team will perform it differently and will deal with unexpected events along the way. Teams may still play their own instrument and have their own dynamic but they are all connected by the underlying beat.

In the early stages of a programme you need the explicit cadence, the visible heartbeat, the ceremonies, the regular touch-points because the teams haven’t yet internalised the programme’s pulse. But if you’ve done it well, over time the programme starts to carry the rhythm internally. The cadence becomes implicit. People know where they are without being told.

A plan on a page with cadence does the same, it holds the whole, it makes you see the big picture, understand the rhythm of the work, see the transitions, the busy points and the less busy ones. Most importantly you can see the checkpoints where the individual rhythms meet and account for each other.

Stop looking for static design of programs and instead treat them like musical scores. Structure will not come from static plans, fixed roles, and rigid processes.

The cadence is the structure.

*This article was originally published on Linkedin.