If you only set the pace per km, without factoring the runner’s conditioning, how well would you be framing the “success” objective? Isn’t that a leader’s responsibility? If your only “visibility” to performance was related to the finish line, how would you assess progress, make decisions and provide support? Isn’t that a leader’s responsibility? Positioned from the team member’s perspective

if you are the runner’s coach, and you’re standing at the finish line, how will they let you know if they are in trouble along the route?

In parallel then, why blindly set superficial sprints for business performance? When we shift our mindset to a drumbeat, we acknowledge and contend with the inherent complexity in our systems. A drumbeat embodies the “sense and respond” nature of Agile. A drumbeat makes allowance for expansion and contraction to incorporate the ever-changing needs and learnings yielded in discovery through progress indicators along the route. A drumbeat acknowledges the subliminal conditions influencing our outcomes, measuring the vitals not the output.

The drumbeat synchronizes hearts and minds, aligning one team member with another in a phygital environment, the team with the objective and the objective to the primary needs and wants of the user. It isn’t an arbitrary isolated check-in point on a timeline; it is highly situational, rightsizing the nexus of skills, capacity, urgency and possibility of meaningful delivery coupling the means with the measures to determine whether the initiative is sufficient to achieve the higher level objectives. Its far more robust than “we’ll meet every Monday.”

When we consider remote teams, it’s important to recognize that neither geography (that the work is physically happening before your eyes) nor waiting at the finish line with a stop watch actually enable you to “see” (sense and respond to) your team’s performance and needs along the way.

Composing a multi-dimensional drumbeat, necessarily unique to your teams, customers and objectives puts a leaders finger on the very pulse of the requisite set of vital signs to achieve impactful progress toward the objective each step of the way.