Decision Cadence
Decision Cadence is the intentional rhythm of your decision-making: how often you review dashboards, which calls belong to each rhythm, and how that matches the behaviour of your metrics.
What we mean by “Decision Cadence”
Decision Cadence is the set of repeating cycles — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly — where specific decisions are expected to be made or confirmed. It is not just a meeting schedule. It is a match between timeframes, leading and lagging metrics, and the cost of acting too early or too late.
Why this changes how people read a dashboard
Without a clear cadence, dashboards become a constant stream of alerts and ad-hoc reviews. Everything feels urgent, and nothing feels owned by a particular moment.
- Teams react to daily noise in metrics that only make sense on a monthly view.
- Or they only look at certain signals once a quarter, long after early warnings were available.
When you will feel this term in real life
Decision Cadence is at the heart of:
- Wrong timing, wrong rhythm — reviews happen too often to see real change, or too rarely to intervene in time.
- Decision fatigue — people are asked to make the same judgment over and over, outside any agreed rhythm.
A good cadence protects attention. It tells people when a signal will be reviewed, and which decisions belong to that moment.
See this term in context
Decision Cadence is explored in depth in:
Related terms in this glossary
Cadence interacts directly with:
If your most important dashboard has no clear review rhythm, it is hard for it to be decision-ready, no matter how good the visuals are.