Rhythm by design.
Your organization has a management operating system whether you designed it or not. Cadence™ makes it visible by mapping every meeting, wiring every dependency, and surfacing the gaps no one is talking about.
Register for early access ↓Coming Late Q2/26
The Problem
Leadership teams hold dozens of recurring meetings, reviews, and planning cycles. But the connections between them (what feeds what, what depends on what, where information stalls) are often invisible. We'd like to change that.
Your leadership team meets weekly. Your board meets quarterly. Your departments run their own cadence. Often these....just happen. The way that these forums connect wasn't designed and outputs from one never reliably become inputs to the next.
The data your board needs exists in a department review. The market insight your strategy team needs lives in a sales pipeline call. But often, there's no connective tissue between them, so some decisions get made without context, some decisions get made too late, some don't get made at all.
Ask some senior leadership teams who owns their operating rhythm and you might get a pause. The CEO sets the tone. The EA manages the calendar. But often, no one has actually designed the system or is accountable for whether it works.
The Tool
We created the Cadence™ Diagnostic to walk through every layer of your organization's current operating rhythm, including governance, leadership cadence, commercial reviews, strategic planning, innovation cycles, people processes, and communication cascades. Our hope is to help you capture what exists, name what's missing, and map the dependencies between them.
The frame
Fiscal year, seasonal rhythms, strategic priorities, and external requirements. The foundation everything else builds on.
The architecture
Board cadence, governance bodies, leadership tiers, department rhythm, external partners. Every forum your organization runs, captured and organized.
The operating picture
Commercial rhythm, planning cycles, innovation and NPD stage gates, people processes, communication cascades. Your organization's complete operating system, made visible, maybe for the first time.
The Why
Which meetings produce outputs that another meeting needs. Where information stalls. What forums should exist but don't. What meetings are out of order and slowing things down. The gaps that hinder your business' growth and the ones that really frustrate your team.
The Output
A single dashboard view that captures your entire operating rhythm, the dependencies between forums, and the gaps that matter most. This isn't a generic template, but customized to your organization, your language and your reality.
The inventory is useful. The gaps are transformative. Every gap identified is a structural failure your organization has been working around — often without realizing it. A board that never sees competitive intelligence. A business review whose outputs go nowhere. A strategy that was set once and never pressure-tested. The most important gaps are the ones you didn't know existed until someone asked the right questions.
Built For
Cadence™ is for the people who are accountable for the operating rhythm — and the ones who realize nobody currently is.
Operating rhythm owners
You're the one who makes the leadership team actually function. You know the meetings aren't connected. You know decisions fall through the cracks between forums. Cadence™ gives you a structured way to see the whole system and redesign it.
Enterprise, SMB, nonprofit
You set the tone for how your leadership team operates, but you've never had a way to see the full operating picture — the meetings, the dependencies, the gaps. Cadence™ surfaces what you've been sensing but couldn't articulate.
VP Strategy, CHRO, consultants
You've been asked to redesign the operating model. The first step is understanding what actually exists. Cadence™ gives you a diagnostic starting point that's grounded in reality, not assumptions.
Your Data
All data encrypted at rest (AES-256) and in transit (TLS 1.2+). Row-level security ensures only you can access your Diagnostic. Industry-standard infrastructure.
Your data is never shared with third parties, never used for benchmarking, and never used to train AI models. Not for marketing, not for anything.
Download your Cadence™ Brief and request complete deletion at any time. For facilitated sessions, mutual NDA before any conversation begins.
Who's Behind This
Founder & Principal · First Domino LLC
A career spent inside the operating rhythms of organizations — designing how leadership teams work together, not just what they work on.
Director of Innovation at Newell Brands, leading insights, ideation, and innovation across global consumer brands — and building the management operating systems that made them run.
COO/GM of The Image Group, focused on brand strategy and creative communications for purpose-forward companies.
Managing Director of NewNorth Center for Design in Business, teaching design strategy and innovation methods to C-suite leaders.
Founder of First Domino, a consulting practice helping leadership teams build strategy, unlock growth, and design how their organizations actually operate.
Every organization has an operating rhythm — a system of meetings, reviews, and planning cycles that drives decisions and alignment. Almost none have designed it intentionally.
The result is predictable: information stalls between forums, decisions get made without context, and strategic priorities get lost between the quarterly board meeting and the Monday morning standup.
Cadence™ exists because the operating rhythm is the highest-leverage design problem in most organizations. Get the cadence right, and everything downstream improves — strategic clarity, execution speed, decision quality, and organizational alignment.
This is the tool I've been building by hand in consulting engagements for years. Now we're making it available to every leadership team that's ready to see what they've been running on.
Cadence™ is in development. Register your interest and we'll reach out when early access opens — or if you'd prefer a facilitated Diagnostic session before the tool launches, let us know.
No pitch, no pressure. Just a note when early access opens.