Governance
The Beat Network requires two roles and one interface between them.
Network holder - maintains the network as a living artefact. Tracks signals, surfaces gate status and stall propagation, prepares stall decisions for leadership. The network holder does the operational work of keeping the cross-cutting view coherent. They do not make decisions about the changes. They make the decisions visible.
Network authority - the leadership team. Makes stall decisions: wait, re-sequence, rework, or dissolve. Approves new changes. Authorises dissolutions. Owns the change, not the artefact.
This separation prevents both common failure modes. The network holder cannot drift into programme management because they lack decision authority over the changes. Leadership cannot treat the network as a status report because stalls with downstream gates demand concrete responses. A stall is not something you note and move on from. It requires one of four actions, and the network makes the consequences of inaction visible through gate propagation.
The cadence
The interface between the two roles is a regular cadence - fortnightly works in most contexts, aligned to the sensing collection cycle. At each cadence the network holder presents the current state of the network: which beats have landed (signals received), which are active, which are stalled, and which downstream gates are affected. Leadership makes the stall decisions. The network holder updates the network accordingly.
Owners of each set of changes attend this cadence and hold their own changes between sessions. They are the people closest to the ground and the first to know when a condition is not met or a signal is not arriving. The network holder aggregates this into the cross-cutting view.
Handover
In an external consulting engagement, the consulting team typically acts as network holder during the engagement. One of the sets of changes - or a beat within an existing set - should be the explicit transfer of network-holding capability to an internal person or team. The engagement succeeds when the network holder role has been handed over and the leadership cadence survives without external support.
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