A rhythm helps to ensure the regularity of early and regular delivery as well as checking and adjusting. The clock creates a rhythm that makes it easy for us humans. Delivering early and regularly as well as inspecting and adapting are as much a part of agile work as breathing is to life. A beat simply alerts us to the fact that it is time to take a breath: to pause for a moment, deliver, inspect and adapt. That's why pacing is a core element of lean and agile.
In Scrum, the cycle is built in: the sprint is the "big" time window. When the sprint, i.e. the cycle, is over, it is time to review what we have delivered and review how we are working. This does not interrupt our flow of deliverables. Many experienced Scrum teams deliver story by story. The sprint review at the end of a sprint is used to review what has been produced in time. The special thing about the sprint cycle in Scrum is that the sprint brings together planning, implementation, review and retrospective in a common cycle.
A cycle also makes sense in Kanban - often called "cadence" in English (see: J. Anderson: Kanban, Blue Hole Press, 2013). In contrast to Scrum, Kanban uses different cadences for different events (see the Article by Karl Scotland). But Kanban also involves regular inspection and adjustment. Corresponding improvement events (events for the implementation of Kaizen) are an integral part of Kanban (daily standup, retrospective, improvement workshop, etc.) Here too, a cycle is a good means of regularly carrying out the improvement events. It also makes sense to regularly review and adjust the delivered product or service with customers, even in the case of a pure Kanban. The cycle (or cadence) is therefore also an important element in Kanban to support the flow of work and give it reliability and repeatability.
A common mistake is to confuse the cycle or time windows with the classic milestones. Milestones are time windows, but usually not a cycle. Takt in Agile is about regular inspection and adjustment. Milestones and takt are two different and independent things. In Scrum, time windows are used to create a cycle.
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