The three meetings

Owners, off switches and review dates only hold if something keeps bringing them round. That's the job of the rhythm: three meetings and two service levels. It's the loop's clock. Almost none of it is new time, because the framework fits it into meetings you already hold.

Those three numbers are the case for a rhythm. People don't know the plan, leaders aren't seen to agree on it, and the manager in the room makes the biggest difference. Each meeting below answers one of them.

Weekly: every team, fifteen to thirty minutes

Each team spends fifteen to thirty minutes a week on three things, inside a meeting it already has. Managers run it. That's where the manager support in the Gallup number comes from: not a speech about AI, but a regular slot where problems get raised and dealt with.

1. The friction list and its statuses. What's new, what's in progress, what's parked, what's done. The list records the work, never the person.
2. Problems with AI output. Anything that went wrong or needed correcting this week. The corrections log from lesson 2 feeds this.
3. Reviews coming due. Which owners have a review this week or next, from lesson 3.

The weekly slot is why problems surface in days rather than quarters. Skip it and the corrections pile up unread, the friction list goes stale, and reviews slip.

Quarterly: leadership, half a day

The leadership team takes half a day every quarter for six things:

1. Restate the aim, with the outside view. What changed among customers, competitors and in how you charge? Then say the aim again, out loud, so people know the plan.
2. Check the conversion ledger. This is the record of freed-up hours and where they went, with evidence. Time only counts once it has gone where the aim said.
3. Confirm the bottleneck, or name the next one.
4. Fund builds that came through the front door with a case.
5. Roles that changed. This is where the third and fourth promises are kept, in the room where it's hardest.
6. Reviews that are due, especially anything high-stakes.

The first quarterly session lands at day 90. It's module 8: you'll score the loop there.

Annually: a day, with IT, security and compliance

Once a year, leadership spends a day with IT, security and compliance on four things: the aim, the guardrails, the vendors and the AI list. This is where rules get their review date. The four principles and the promises are fixed, so no meeting reviews them.

The two service levels

Two things in the rhythm aren't meetings. They're promises about response time.

• The front door. Anyone can raise anything: a friction point, a tool they made, a request. The person who runs the loop gives a first answer within 10 working days: adopt it, park it or build it. You set it up in module 6.
• The bottleneck check. The bottleneck lead checks the handoffs between teams every two weeks during the first loop, then monthly. Bottlenecks between teams belong to nobody unless someone is booked to look.

The same rhythm at every size

The rhythm changes shape with the organisation, not its substance.

• Below 20 people, it all folds into meetings the business already holds: fifteen minutes a week inside an existing meeting, a two-hour session each quarter with the owner and the outside builder, and a half day once a year. The outside builder answers the front door.
• From 20 to 1,000, it runs as described above.
• Above 1,000, it runs through forums you already have. Each unit runs its own weekly and quarterly meetings and answers its own front door. The guardrails and the AI list stay central, and the lead of the shared-services loop for legal, security and procurement sits in every unit's quarterly meeting, so the units don't flood those shared teams.

How to tell the rhythm is slipping

Rhythms rarely stop on purpose. They fade. Four signs show it early, and the person who runs the loop should watch for them:

• The weekly slot is skipped twice running in any team. Problems with AI output start waiting a month instead of a week.
• The friction list stops changing. If nothing has moved from new to in progress, parked or done in a month, nobody is working it.
• Reviews go overdue. One late review is a busy week. Several mean the owners have stopped believing the dates matter.
• The front door slows down. The pilot kit tracks the days from raising something to its first answer, and reports them every two weeks. A median over 10 working days counts against the framework, because a slow door is what sends people back to building things on their own.

None of these needs a new meeting to fix. Each one goes on the friction list, like any other piece of work that waits.

Put it in the calendar

Choose your size, the meeting the weekly slot lives inside, and the first quarterly and annual dates. The calendar file brings in the weekly check-in, both sessions, the bottleneck checks and every review date from lesson 3.