Every organisation has a resting cadence. Most programmes leave it unchanged.

Jesper E. Thomsen · 16 October 2026

Organisations run at a speed produced by how they are put together, and they return to it when extra pressure is removed. That speed changes when control over the thing setting the pace changes. Most programmes never reach it.

Most transformation work starts from the question of how to get the organisation moving. I think the better question is what keeps producing the speed it already has, and whether that can be touched at all. Every organisation has a speed it returns to once extra pressure is removed. That speed is produced by how the organisation is put together. Most programmes change the speed for a while without changing what produces it.

Removing blockers is a different idea. Blocker language assumes there is a faster organisation underneath, held back by things in the way. If that were true, removing them would work permanently, and often it does not. The obstruction returns under another name because the conditions that produced it are still there. The speed you see is the organisation working as it is built. A faster one would have to be built.

Two definitions

Cadence is the time from something that calls for a decision to a resource being committed, measured on the decisions that determine whether the organisation adapts. Recognising a problem has its own clock, and so does executing once the decision is taken. The clock that matters is commitment.

Resting cadence is the cadence the organisation goes back to once the extra pressure is off. Every organisation has one. A crisis, a new CEO, a transformation office or a consulting engagement can move the organisation away from it for a while. The organisation then drifts back. Neither the size of the move nor the time it takes to come back is a change in resting cadence. Only a change in what produces it is.

Efficiency is something else. It is output per unit of input inside one process, and it gets mistaken for cadence all the time.

What holds the resting cadence in place

Resting cadence is produced continuously by a set of arrangements that set the pace and reinforce each other. They are who has the right to decide and how many layers approve, the meeting and reporting calendar, the budget cycle and how resources get allocated, incentives, who gets promoted and who succeeds whom, what information is available to whom, how much risk and failure is tolerated, who owns the company, and who actually holds power.

Four things follow from these arrangements working together.

Speeds inside the organisation do not add up. Cutting a development cycle to one week changes nothing if the board approves every six weeks. The slowest required step on the path every real decision has to pass through sets the pace, and that step is normally governance. I will call it the binding element. The efficiency improves and the speed does not, which is why transformation programmes can report real improvements and still change nothing.

Apparatus builds up over time. Adding a control costs one incident and one decision. Removing it needs somebody to put their name on the risk that remains, and nobody volunteers. Meanwhile behaviour routes around the controls. The organisation gets formally slower and behaves the same, and the gap widens the older it gets and the more incidents it has been through. The end state is easy to recognise. Governance is heavy and eats time without governing anything, while the real decisions travel through channels on nobody's org chart.

Cadence therefore does not live only in the formal apparatus. The formal part can be redesigned, but the informal system often restores the old pace. A redesign alone rarely reaches who actually holds power.

And the set-up reproduces itself through people. Promotion and succession favour those who are comfortable at the current pace and who read faster colleagues as reckless. Leaders get pulled into the organisation's rhythm at least as much as the other way round.

Why a faster unit inside the company does not spread

A unit running at a different cadence inside the organisation is often rejected rather than absorbed, and strong performance does not protect it. Putting it in a separate structure may only make the rejection cleaner.

I have run both versions. At Maersk, X-Leap in 2010 and the later Simplification programme were both placed outside the line. Both delivered, and both were wound down once they came to be seen as running on the side. In both cases the break point was a fast IT organisation up against legacy waterfall IT. Performance was never the problem. The faster body lost on cadence.

When resting cadence does change

Resting cadence changes in three situations. Control of the binding element changes. The organisation's link to its environment changes. Or the slack is used up, meaning the spare margin of money, time and people that lets an organisation run slower than its environment without feeling it, so that the environment's own clock starts to set the pace.

Control here means control over the binding element, which is wider than ownership of the company. The people who control it often draw their authority from it, so the proposal to change it rarely comes from the people usually asked to make the change.

That makes ownership events unusually effective. A buyout, an IPO, a delisting, a merger, an activist coming in, a founder leaving or a forced recapitalisation changes several of the pace-setting arrangements at once. Near-death often has the same effect, because it reallocates control and burns the slack that was covering the mismatch. Motivation on its own does not do that.

Private equity is the strongest confirming case, and a better one than the celebrated turnarounds because the intervention is repeated. PE changes the operating cadence of ordinary companies by changing the reporting calendar, capital allocation, the board, incentives and slack at the same time, from outside. It reaches the informal system because it changes who holds power and who is still in the building.

The same logic explains why a domain hire can fail on cadence. A Chief Digital Officer brought in for digital expertise may have no authority over anything that produces the organisation's speed. I made this argument when two such roles were being designed, and I still think the outside hires were the wrong answer. The qualification that mattered was understanding how the organisation worked, and domain knowledge did not supply it.

What this means for strategy

A strategy that needs a faster cadence than the current one is incomplete until it says how the arrangements that set the pace will change. Cadence is a constraint to settle before the strategy rather than an execution problem to handle after it. A board reading a plan that assumes a speed the organisation has never sustained should ask which arrangement changes, who owns that change, and what risk moves to whom.

Slower can be the right answer

Cadence is calibrated to the environment and the risk profile. Pharma and financial organisations are often slow for good reason, because the cost of a mistake shows up over long horizons. Other organisations carry too much risk appetite and need to slow down. The argument takes no position on direction. It explains why speed is stable. The test of whether anything has changed is whether the organisation keeps operating differently after the extra pressure is gone.