The organization that I’m a part of has always had its very clear rhythm – a “ticking ensemble” of the key aspects of our execution: annual budget planning, quarterly business and OKR planning, bi-weekly sprint planning and group gatherings (all-hands, leadership team etc.). But outside of that, for a long time, most individual initiatives have proceeded on their own timelines, with their own (often irregular) meeting cadences.

Over the last six months, I started noticing a subtle change. A certain underlying pulse emerged – a uniform weekly cadence that more and more initiatives seemed to take on by default. It wasn’t easy to notice it because this pulse felt natural: a coming-together of a large group of key stakeholders for a given initiative on a weekly schedule, with a recurring agenda, a discussion, takeaways and homework for next time. This cadence has felt comfortable, almost automatic. It is clear who has to do what, information is shared widely, and it seems that no balls are being dropped.

So, I should feel elated, shouldn’t I? I wasn’t so sure.

I wanted to explore my doubt. Where did this Pulse come from? I noticed that it was preferred by program managers, and was often introduced by people new to the organization, or in response to initiatives becoming heavier in cross-functional dependencies. As I asked the organizers what they perceived the value of this cadence to be, they pointed to the low cognitive load (simply invite everyone for a single meeting once a week, using a highly structured format that everyone understands), better scalability (can replicate the model to more initiatives), and built-in accountability (since the meeting involved those in oversight positions). The organizers were skilled at running such processes efficiently.

Sounds great, except that this cadence has little bearing on reality for most initiatives! The time between meetings is arbitrary, the audience is selected to be as broad as possible, and the focus invariably shifts to going through the motions of the meetings (sub-group status updates, checking homework boxes etc.) instead of anchoring on important aspects of the initiative. As a result, a lot more people’s time is wasted, and many initiatives drag on. The time between meetings becomes the “quantum” that all work aligns with. Even if the next milestone can be achieved in two days, we default to “the next meeting” which is often one or two weeks away. In between meetings, very little actually happens – usually because teams that follow the Pulse need to juggle dozens of initiatives.

I thought of school – a place where the Pulse is so deeply ingrained that it becomes invisible. Weekly classes involve everyone coming together; it’s usually when homework is due and/or given out; throughout a semester students make progress on a subject. I’d argue that schools are a perfect use case for the Pulse. Courses are contrived by design – the goal is to further our learning, which benefits from repetition. Students take multiple courses, so a standard cadence eases the logistics. An easy-to-understand cadence maximizes focus on the learning itself.

But initiatives in a workplace don’t have a single pulse; they have varying velocities, need a mixture of offline and online work with unpredictable cadence, and – as is the case in my organization – generally are able to move forward faster than any standard quantum of time can dictate.

I don’t think that setting the Pulse is wrong per se; in fact, as organizations grow in complexity, the benefits of such a structure might at some point outweigh the costs. The Pulse is great for multi-tasking, ensuring that each initiative gets its fair share of attention. But precisely because the Pulse is so familiar, so comfortable, so “autopilot-like”, it tends to win the natural selection game in organizations even before it provides significant benefits. It takes a few new people – or a few senior enough leaders – introducing it for other initiatives to begin to adhere to it too. So the word of caution, perhaps, is that the Pulse, while not intrinsically wrong, tends to be introduced prematurely.

How can leaders break out of the Pulse if it is unnecessary? They need to (1) acknowledge it, (2) pick out initiatives that benefit the least from it, and start by (3) dropping the general meeting while (4) offering an equivalent substitute. Let’s cover each of these guidelines in order.

(1) Acknowledge the Pulse

When practiced regularly, the Pulse becomes invisible. At a limit, teams may find it difficult to imagine an alternative way to run initiatives. Hence, the first step in any kind of change is to acknowledge and identify the elements of the Pulse, and especially their drawbacks when applied to various initiatives. Is there a recurring mass meeting that includes far too many people and doesn’t seem to provide value to most of them? Does the project seem to progress gradually regardless of how much bandwidth the team has to work on it? Is changing course difficult for the team? Are decisions made based on the cadence, rather than the other way around (for example, do teams agree on a timeline based on the next mass meeting, as opposed to how much time the work will actually take)? Once you see the Pulse, it’s hard to unsee it.

(2) Find candidates for disruption

Find initiatives that are particularly handicapped by the Pulse. It could be the smallest project, or one that was added to the Pulse out of inertia. Perhaps its leader tends to be accommodating and didn’t question the new cadence. No matter what the reason, try to find an initiative that is particularly ineffective because of the Pulse. It will become your pilot. It’s an easy start – if you can’t prove the value of an alternative approach with a hand-picked example, maybe the Pulse is actually appropriate for your organization.

(3) The Hardest Step

By far the hardest step is to drop the general meeting for your pilot initiative. This takes guts – stakeholders and superiors may believe that this will lead to the project failing. In the very least, they may feel that they are being taken out of the loop. You will also lose the natural venue for accountability and project management. This move is not without drawbacks, but the best answer to any criticism is to…

(4) Offer a valuable substitute

Ask every participant what they were getting out of the meeting. Offer good written updates for those who like being informed. Often the meeting is a forcing mechanism for people to absorb the context – perhaps you can offer to set up a block for the team members or stakeholders just to read the material and ask questions. Reducing the meeting to a much smaller “read-out” meeting just for these people is still a better use of time for everyone. If the meeting does feature productive conversations, identify milestones for breakout groups and give teams the agency to get to them in a way they see fit – not necessarily via a meeting. If the team prefers to meet, instead of meeting on a regular cadence, have the team estimate how much time they will need to prepare and set up an ad hoc meeting based on their estimates. As you replace a single, large, low information-density meeting with multiple, diverse, often asynchronous interactions, double down on the benefits of such interactions. Are the teams writing down a lot more, which allows you to onboard new team members faster? Are you able to look up past decisions without having to rehash them? Do team members in other time zones find themselves having more of a voice? Turn your experiment into a success case study.

The Pulse is not an evil construct infecting all work in an organization. But it’s also not a risk-free, high-ROI no-brainer process. If you see clear signs of the Pulse, chances are, some initiatives may have been swept in it to their detriment. It’s possible to resist or even reverse the Pulse, but the best way is to be intentional and gradual – pick initiatives that can most benefit from a change, and untangle them from the Pulse, often starting with doing away with the large recurring meeting. Small wins can snowball into a healthy set of best practices for your organization around which projects should use the Pulse, and which benefit from a more ad hoc approach.