Here are two scenarios that illustrate the same issue ...
1) Largo
It was only week two of the new quarter, and Sarah's team were staring into the jaws of an inconvenient truth. The problem they'd been tasked with solving wasn't actually the problem. They should be doing something quite different. But the OKRs had been signed off. The roadmap was locked down. Changing anything major before the end of the quarter would mean a bunch of people having to admit they'd made a mistake. So they kept going. Maybe they'd get things right next year.
2) Allegro
"New priority!" pinged Slack, for the third time that month. Maya looked at the halfway-completed concepts she started two weeks ago. Concepts that she'd been assured were going to be the next big thing. They were shaping up so nicely, too. She'd already dropped another project so she could work on these concepts. Now they too were destined for the pile of permanently postponed projects. Maybe she should stop putting in so much effort until things settled down.
The underlying issue for both of these vignettes? A team out of sync with their organisation's tempo.
The Tempo Trap
Every organisation has a natural tempo that emerges over time and is almost impossible to shift deliberately.
Some companies pulse around quarterly planning – and changing anything significant inside a quarter is functionally impossible.
Others have new priorities popping up every couple of weeks – and if you insist on crowbarring in quarterly OKRs, work just gets stuffed in behind the scenes until the stress breaks something. And the OKRs end up changing anyway.
Annual budgets have a habit of marmalising any attempt at Agile-style iteration. Similarly, enforced Agile 2-week sprints create unnecessary overhead and stress for a structured 18-month replatforming project.
Your organisation's tempo is a constraint, like gravity. You can't ignore it, you have to design for it when you're considering what to work on and how you'll work.
There's no universal "correct" tempo for an organisation or for you personally. The problems start because different work takes different amounts of time.
A big redesign will take a year or so. If your stakeholders change direction more frequently than that ... don’t even try it.
Meanwhile, experimenting to find product-market fit means changing your mind weekly (or even daily) for months on end. If the org can’t tolerate that pace, you'll find yourself locked into quarterly planning, half-heartedly launching something you knew was doomed 11 weeks ago.
When tempos clash, teams end up burned out. Projects get abandoned, delayed or just plain fail. Eventually, you lose any competitive advantage.
So, how do you know when your work's natural rhythm doesn't match the organisation's beat?
You’ll feel it in your bones, baby.
Finding the pocket
For anyone who isn't a jazz nerd: "in the pocket" describes when a group of musicians are totally in sync, sensing and responding to each other and to the music itself in real time. You can tell if a band is in the pocket because you can't help but tap your toes.
- First, observe your org’s natural tempo. Bear in mind that this is probably different from the official planning beats. How often do big decisions actually get made? How frequently do priorities actually shift? That’s your org’s tempo, regardless of what the documentation says. If you're in the office, you can feel the emotional tension and release around decision making moments.
- Notice how the org’s natural tempo differs from the timings in plans for getting work done. It feels like draaaag if you can't get anyone to change course on a zombie project. It feels like whiplash if “the strategy keeps changing – can’t someone just commit and stick to it?!”
If neither of those resonates, congrats, maybe you’re already in the pocket!
But if you're feeling the drag or the whiplash, here's what to do.
Chunks vs. bubbles
Ideally, to fix a broken pocket, you need to chunk your work differently so it better fits the org’s rhythm.
Rather than waiting for that 12-month complete redesign that you’ll never get to finish, shape several shorter projects that actually get done inside the org's tempo, each one making things a little bit better.
For instance, a client of ours had a priority list comprised of items of wildly different scopes. Some would take hours. Some would take years. And everything in between. We noticed that the priority order shifted roughly once a month, so we're now breaking down the big projects and bundling up the smaller ones to frame everything in chunks of (you guessed it) about a month.
And if you can't chunk your work differently? You need to create a temporary bubble with a different tempo by managing expectations and creating strategic cover.
Imagine a team that shows up once a quarter with a new set of shiny, exciting visuals they’re never seriously going to work on – creating a smokescreen so they can get on with fast, messy iteration in peace. We know teams like this. Though this can sound like subterfuge, it's smart organisational navigation, creating a lively bubble inside a stiff chunk.
With our one-month-tempo client, we needed a daily iteration rhythm for a piece of discovery work. We repurposed a month-long "customer challenge" project which looked like — and from a certain viewpoint really was — a continuous piece of work, neatly planned upfront. But the details of our work had to be improvised day-by-day, with the brief unfolding as we got daily feedback and learned more.
We created a container that made sense at the scale of a month but had the flexibility of a natural daily tempo. Recognising and adapting to the org's tempo bought us the space to carry on.
Have you tangled with the Tempo Trap? How did it show up for you, and how did you handle it? Is it showing up now we've pointed it out? Hit reply and let us know!
Tom & Corissa x
