The quarter that goes badly

Everything above works in a good quarter.

The quarter that decides whether you still have a system is the one where the numbers are bad, somebody good resigns, and a customer you cannot afford to lose starts asking difficult questions.

I can tell you what will happen, roughly in this order.

What goes first

The protected hours. Every time. The time needed to move strategic goals when you’re fighting fires or your bonus-gated health metrics are at risk.

Then the ideas stop. Nobody cancels them. They just aren't looked at, and the list stops being mentioned.

Then confidence drops. The team is not focused on increasing it.

And then somebody adds a goal mid-quarter with nothing coming off, because the situation is urgent and the rules feel like a luxury. At which point you have your old way of working back, with new words on it.

If you can only hold three things, hold these. The weekly meeting keeps ending in a decision, even if the decision is stop. Anything added has something coming off, in the same conversation, in writing. And somebody stops something well, publicly, because a bad quarter is the best teaching moment you will get and whatever people see becomes the rule.

Let the protected hours go if you have to. They are recoverable. What people learned in a bad quarter is not.

All of this will test your commitment to how you want to operate. The decisions you make will teach your team culture-defining lessons. I’ve seen it, and it needs to be thought about carefully before you act, which is where having a coach can help you.

Why a year, and not a quarter

Four cycles.

The first teaches the mechanics. The second builds the habit. The third and fourth are the ones where something goes wrong, and the old behaviour is still available, and surviving that is the only evidence that it holds.

The thing you personally will find hardest

Not the process. The moment when you find your strategy might not be working and needs to be adapted. A goal that is aligned should be stopped. You are in the room, and stopping it will look like you were wrong.

You were. That is what a bet is.

And what happens in those ten seconds will teach your company more about ambition than anything else you do this year. If you stop it cleanly and say why, stopping becomes possible for everybody else. If you defend it for another cycle, you have taught the room that goals are reputations, and nobody will bring you an honest number again.