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operating-cadence

operating-cadence 1 min read Free

Operating Cadence and Management Systems Series #10: How to Know If You're Running a System or Just Running.

The final post is a diagnostic and a reframe. Management theater is not a personality problem. It's a structural problem. Teams run meetings because meetings are what their managers do. They produce planning decks because that's what the annual cycle expects. They do weekly updates because
operating-cadence 2 min read Free

Operating Cadence and Management Systems Series #9: Information Flow Is Architecture. Bad Flow Breaks Everything.

Most organizational information flow is accidental — it happens because people default to sharing what they know, not because anyone designed what needs to travel where, to whom, how often, and in what format. The result is predictable: too much information moves vertically (up and down the hierarchy) and not enough
operating-cadence 2 min read Free

Operating Cadence and Management Systems Series #8: Follow-Through Is the System. Everything Else Is Aspiration.

The most reliable indicator of whether an operating system is working is not the quality of the plans — it's the follow-through rate. Commitments made in planning sessions, staff meetings, and one-on-ones that don't get followed through aren't signs of individual failure. They're
operating-cadence 2 min read Free

Operating Cadence and Management Systems Series #7: Decision Forums: How to Design Who Decides What and Make It Stick.

In most organizations, decision rights are vague, contested, or silently ceded over time. Nobody redesigned them explicitly — they just evolved through a combination of personality, default behavior, and whoever cared most about any given issue. The result is a pattern where important decisions either get made by default (whoever cares
operating-cadence 2 min read Free

Operating Cadence and Management Systems Series #6: Operating Reviews: How to Know If Your Organization Is Actually Healthy.

Operating reviews — the periodic deep-dives into how the organization is actually running — are where most leadership teams fail to see what they need to see. The problem is almost always information architecture: the metrics reported up are the metrics that are easy to produce, not the metrics that reveal whether
operating-cadence 2 min read Free

Operating Cadence and Management Systems Series #5: Staff Meetings Are Supposed to Make Decisions. Most Don't.

A staff meeting without a decision agenda is a status briefing. Most staff meetings are status briefings. The result: the leadership team leaves aligned on what everyone is doing but has made zero decisions about the things that actually need deciding — tradeoffs, reprioritization, resource conflicts, strategic divergences. They spent two
operating-cadence 2 min read Free

Operating Cadence and Management Systems Series #4: One-on-Ones Are Not Status Meetings. They Are the Most Important Forum You Have.

The one-on-one is the highest-leverage meeting in management — and the most consistently wasted. Most one-on-ones devolve into one of three things: a status update (what did I do this week), a task review (what do I need to do next), or an awkward silence punctuated by "anything else?"
operating-cadence 2 min read Free

Operating Cadence and Management Systems Series #3: Quarterly and Annual Reviews: From Reporting Rituals to Actual Calibration

End-of-quarter and end-of-year reviews are usually backward-looking report-outs that tell you what already happened. That's marginally useful for record-keeping and useless for running. The real job of a quarterly review is calibration: did our assumptions hold? Did we allocate resources correctly in retrospect? Did our operating system surface
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