# Operating rhythm

## When to load this mode

The user says "we keep dropping things," "our weekly is useless," "we forgot the quarterly goals by week six," or "I need a dashboard." Load for meeting cadence, KPI set, or leadership-team rhythm. If they ask for a tool stack first, push back: rhythm before tools.

## What an operating rhythm is for

A rhythm is the smallest set of recurring loops that surfaces decisions on time. Four loops, each tuned to a different signal-frequency. The right person sees the right number in time to act.

Install one without the other three and the business compensates with heroics. The founder works weekends to cover the missing weekly. The priority list dies.

## The four loops

**Daily huddle — 15 minutes, standing.** One question per person: what's stuck or at risk today? Not status updates. Only things that need someone else's hand to clear. If nobody's stuck, end in five minutes.

**Weekly tactical — 60 minutes, fixed day and time.** Open with the dashboard — the same six to ten numbers every week. Two minutes per number: what moved, why, action. Then priorities for the next seven days, named by owner. Close with "what's not getting said."

**Monthly KPI review — 90 minutes.** Same numbers plus trend lines. Where is the operational quality metric — the one that predicts the lagging financial number — drifting? What broke this month nobody saw? One decision: what changes in the next 30 days.

**Quarterly priority reset — half day, off-site if you can.** Three to five priorities for the next 90 days. Each has one owner and one observable outcome (a noun a customer or accountant would recognize). If it can't pass "would a stranger know whether we did it," it's not a priority.

## Procedure to install

1. **Find the broken loop.** Ask: "When something gets dropped, where in the calendar should it have been caught?" If the answer is "we never look at that" — that's the missing loop. Most small companies have a weekly and nothing else. Daily and monthly are the gaps.

2. **Build the dashboard for the weekly first.** Six to ten numbers. Revenue, pipeline coverage, gross margin, one operational quality metric (delivery time, error rate, NPS, first-response time), one leading indicator (qualified meetings, demos run, content shipped). If doubling the number would change nothing, drop it.

3. **Install one loop at a time.** Add the missing loop. Run two cycles. Did it produce decisions? If yes, add the next. If no, fix it first.

4. **Stamp the install in `TEAM_MEMORY.md`.** Which loops, what time, which owner. That's how Sales knows when pipeline review happens; that's how Finance knows when to deliver monthly numbers.

## Decision rules

- **Install only the missing loop.** If the team has a working weekly, don't redesign it; add the daily or monthly.
- **Cap each agenda at five items.** A six-item agenda becomes a four-item agenda by the third meeting because nothing was decided on items five and six. Cut earlier.
- **One owner per priority. Always.** "Shared ownership" means nobody owns it.
- **Kill a loop that hasn't produced a decision in two consecutive runs.** Don't reform it twice. Kill it; rebuild from scratch when you know what was wrong.
- **The dashboard is the same week to week.** Changing what you measure mid-quarter is how you avoid noticing the trend.

## Anti-patterns

- **The 90-minute weekly that's three meetings stacked.** Updates, project status, and morale check don't belong in one room. Split or cut two.
- **Quarterly priorities that are verbs.** "Improve onboarding" is not a priority. "First-week activation rate above 70%" is.
- **Adding meetings to fix a meeting.** If the weekly isn't producing decisions, don't add a pre-weekly. Cut the agenda by half and require a decision per item.
- **KPI dashboards with twenty numbers.** When everything is a key metric, none are. Six to ten, no more.
- **Off-sites without a follow-up rhythm.** A quarterly reset without a weekly is a vacation with whiteboards.

## Before / after

**Before:**

> User: "We had a great Q1 planning off-site. Everyone was aligned. Then by April nothing got done and we don't know what happened."

Diagnosis: no weekly loop to surface drift. The quarterly set priorities; nothing weekly held them accountable. The list died in week three; nobody noticed until April.

**After:**

> Install: weekly tactical, Tuesdays 9am, 60 min. Dashboard first. Each Q-priority owner gives "on track / at risk / off track" with one number. Close: blockers needing founder's hand. By week four the team predicts which priorities land. By week eight, off-track priorities got fixed or formally dropped — written in TEAM_MEMORY — instead of silently dying.
