A fixed decision rhythm of weekly, monthly and quarterly forums that removes latency from execution.
In the median mid-market organisation, necessary decisions spend nine working weeks a year in queues. They are not being analysed for most of that time. They are waiting for a meeting with the authority to decide. The forums that already exist review activity instead, so decisions improvise a route through the organisation, and an improvised route is a slow one.
The model replaces improvised escalation with a fixed rhythm: a weekly operating forum for execution decisions, a monthly forum for resource and priority decisions, a quarterly forum for direction, with every recurring decision class assigned to exactly one of the three, a named owner and a standard input. Latency falls because nothing has to find its own way to a decision. Clients argue about the quarterly forum more than the other two, since a whole day of the executive team looks expensive beside the slide review it replaces. It stays in the model because it is the only place in the rhythm where direction can actually change.
The operating forum. Execution decisions against the outcome baseline: unblock, re-sequence, stop. Activity is reported in writing beforehand, so the hour is spent deciding rather than briefing.
60–90 minutesThe resource forum. Priorities, funding shifts and cross-functional trade-offs. The load map is reviewed here, and nothing new starts unless something stops.
Half dayThe direction forum. Strategy against evidence: what the operating data says about the choices, and what changes. Fed by the verified outcome ledger, not the activity report.
One dayThe three tiers are installed together. A weekly forum without a monthly resource forum simply moves the queue upstream. Decision classes are assigned once, in writing, during installation, and that session is the one piece of the work a client cannot hand to us.
Organisations where decision latency is measurably pricing out programme value. The companion brief sets out how to measure it before anything is installed.
Family-owned and founder-led firms, where the model routes personal authority through fixed forums rather than pretending it away.
Transformation programmes, as the governance layer of Draw · Hold · Release, with outcomes reviewed weekly against the month-0 baseline.
We have installed the model in more than forty organisations since 2023, and the first figure below is a median, so half of those installations recovered less than the number shown:
The Institute stewards the model and revises it after every tenth application review. The last revision rewrote the decision-class templates after the family-industrials field study, because a template built for committees does not fit a firm where the authority sits with a person. Superseded editions remain citable.
Cite as: Markham Institute, “The Operating Cadence Model”, MKM-F-002, v2.1 (2026).