The clock starts again. On rhythm.

A reorganisation is announced. Not the first: the previous one was introduced eighteen months ago, and most people will tell you it never fully arrived. The new structure is on paper, the roles are divided, and yet some teams still work the way they did before.

The board sees this too. The conclusion seems obvious: we need to push through. So something new is placed on top of something unfinished.

What happens when you push through

In 1993, Amburgey, Kelly and Barnett set out to find what one change does to the odds of the next. Their finding, published in Administrative Science Quarterly, is uncomfortable. Every change immediately raises two things: the chance that it fails, and the chance that another one follows soon after. Change is not only risky in itself, it calls itself up.

The good news is in what comes next. That raised risk does subside, but only when time passes without a new intervention. Staggered change with real intervals measurably outperforms reorganisations that follow one another.

So pushing through while the previous change has not landed resets the counter to zero. Not as a punishment, but as a mechanism.

That study is old, and it is fair to ask whether it still stands. The most recent work that connects to it directly comes from Kanitz, Huy, Backmann and Hoegl in 2022. They followed change initiatives in real time and saw that simultaneous initiatives get in each other’s way: employees experience them as contradictory, and that provokes feelings which slow the whole further. It is the strongest recent argument that changes cannot simply be added up. With one limitation worth stating: it is a single organisation, followed qualitatively. A sharp picture, then, not a broad measurement.

Changing less is not the answer

This is where the reasoning usually turns the wrong way. If change weighs, then do less of it. That does not hold, and it has been measured. A long-running study of the European insurance sector between 1995 and 2004 found that organisations changing too little perform as poorly as organisations changing too much. Standing still is not the safe option, it is another way of falling behind.

What set the two groups apart was not their speed. It was whether there was alternation in it: real periods of change, followed by real periods in which the new was allowed to settle. That is what rhythm means. Not slower, but with edges in between.

The figure above places the same five changes twice, each the same length. In the top row they run into each other, and at the busiest moment three are open at once. In the bottom row they follow one another. That takes longer, and that is the price. What you get for it is that something is finished each time.

There is a point where it tips

So why does that room in between weigh so heavily? In 2002 Rudolph and Repenning built a case-based model that offers an explanation. Organisations do not only give way under large events. They also give way under the accumulation of small interruptions. Below a certain threshold the system corrects itself: something comes up, it is absorbed, the work carries on. Above that threshold it turns, and each new interruption reinforces the last.

That explains why change load can feel so sudden. Nothing has changed about the nature of the work, only about how much sits on it at once, and still it stops running. Here too the limitation belongs with it: this is a formal model, not a measurement in the field. What it offers is an explanation that fits what you see, not proof that it works that way.

A pause only counts if you use it

Here comes the caveat that holds this reasoning up, and that often falls away. The room in between does not do the work by itself. It only works when it is used.

At the level of the organisation this is well known: a breathing space works if you use it to restore capacity and process quality. If that does not happen, the organisation has waited and gained nothing. At the level of the people the same applies. In 2015, in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Sonnentag described how recovery from work pressure requires real distance. The mere absence of a new project, while the underlying pressure simply continues, is not recovery.

A period without an announcement is therefore not the same as a period of anchoring. The difference lies in what you do instead: finishing, clearing up, letting things settle, and saying out loud that it is done.

What that asks of a board

Rhythm is not a pace you pick. It is an order you impose, and that is work. Three questions keep coming back: what comes now, what waits, and when does the new get the time to stay.

Those questions can only be answered if someone sees the whole. That is usually where it pinches: every initiative has an owner, and the whole has none. It is the same blind spot as with change load. Every plan on its own is defensible, and still the sum does not add up.

Directing that order is something other than tracking projects. It means deciding what does not go ahead, what shifts and what gets simplified, so that what does go ahead can actually land. The design of the organisation determines how much room there is for that: the more a change has to travel through the whole house, the less can run at once.

The goal is not calm

Rhythm is easily read as the calm before the storm, or as a request to take it easier. That is the opposite of what it is. An organisation in rhythm does not change less. It keeps moving, change after change, without losing its balance, because something sits between the movements.

It is also the only form that holds. Change keeps coming, and there is little to be done about that supply. About the order in which it lands, there is. What that looks like in practice is on the approach.