For a lot of us, the workweek feels like a chaotic, exhausting mess. 

Progress on the projects that matter is grindingly slow, yet somehow every day feels like a nine-alarm fire. 🔥

So how do we put out the flames? 

With a meeting Cadence that fits the urgency of your mission, not the calendar’s whims. 

Cadence is about having a consistent, predictable pattern for when, why, and how we meet. 

The consistency allows teams to navigate uncertainty with confidence and cohesion. The predictability helps them create focus and reclaim time for value-add work. 

Typically, it looks like this: a Monday Action meeting to prioritize what needs to happen and who’s responsible, flexible mid-week collaboration, and a Friday Demo meeting to share progress and gather feedback. Rinse, repeat. 🧼

But Cadence isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. You need to find the right rhythm to match your team’s unique needs. 

Below you’ll find a client story straight from TEAMS THAT MEET THE MOMENT that shows how a tailored Cadence can totally revolutionize outcomes: 

"The European division of a global pet nutrition company had always approached strategic initiatives the same way…until a client we’ll call Miranda transformed their cross-functional teaming. 

Tasked with managing high-level priorities across multiple countries, where the standard approach was to create a central program and cascade it for local adaptation, Miranda envisioned something different. 

Having worked with our team at August, she introduced a radically new team structure and Cadence anchored around the company's annual business rhythm—a six-month sprint cycle with a fixed release date at the June global commercial meeting. 

Miranda designed her team’s Cadence to work backward from this critical milestone, creating a predictable pattern that everyone could plan around.

Rather than defaulting to weekly meetings that interrupted people’s “day jobs,” Miranda designed a nested Cadence better suited to their context: weekly alignment check-ins, with one intensive week per month where the team would travel to a different country location and meet as a group. 

During intensive weeks, the team had a compressed daily Cadence to boost momentum: morning Action Meetings to plan the day, Collaborative work sessions throughout, and end-of-day Demos to share progress.

The results were remarkable. Long-lasting programs were created and implemented across countries, something that would have been nearly impossible with their traditional adaptation approach.

This Cadence worked because it matched the rhythm of the business. It respected the work’s urgency and people’s capacity while synchronizing with the organization’s broader decision-making calendar, allowing teams to create solutions that launched on time—and endured."

Despite the challenges that came with global collaboration, Miranda’s team found a way to work in lockstep. 

When it feels like the world is on fire, having a steady rhythm gives your team a reliable framework for responding together. 🧑‍🚒

By establishing (and protecting) a strong Cadence, teams can transform from reactive firefighters into proactive creators, delivering consistent value while maintaining their sanity in the process.

Karina Mangu-Ward

Partner, August Public