Rhythm: the Original Coordination Technology

Rhythm is the pulse of synchronisation that keeps a team coordinated. It’s about who, when, and why we meet. There are 4 essential rhythms that keep a team humming:

1. CONNECTING Trust is the fundamental building block of any collaboration, so we set aside time to intentionally build and maintain trust.
   

2. PLANNING We collectively agree on the high-level direction, so we can leave the details up to the autonomy of each team member.
   

3. WORKING We allocate tasks, visualise work-in-progress, and create peer-to-peer accountability, using processes from Agile & Kanban.
   

4. REFLECTING A habit of regular retrospectives ensures we’re always learning and making continuous improvements to our ways of working.

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Here’s the “Rhythms Map” we use to visualise the coordination of our own team at The Hum. You can see we spend time on each of the 4 priorities: connecting, planning, working, and reflecting. We have coordinating rhythms that operate on different time-scales, from daily to quarterly or yearly.

Visualising team collaboration rhythms

You can use this tool to help you think about the structure you need when you’re getting started with a new collaboration. Or if you’re in an existing team that’s not perfectly in sync, you can use these 4 rhythms as a lens to diagnose the issue.

Download the Rhythms Map here to reflect on your own team rhythms.