Hey there,
Next week the year turns. The summer solstice falls on the night of the 20th, and by one of those alignments I've stopped calling coincidence, our build cycle closes in the same week. The calendar ahead is a wall of retrospectives, five of them across two days, every project we bet on in May coming back to tell us what it became. And a few days after the longest day, the team sits down together for something we've never done before, which I'll come to. The whole week has the shape of a hinge.
I've learned to treat these turning points deliberately, to clear the desk before crossing rather than rush on into the next cycle. So before the light peaks I want to look back at what I set in motion when the year began, because something about it has quietly rearranged itself in my understanding.
What December Wrote
At the end of last year I used this journal to set three objectives for myself as CEO. Partnerships and funding. Trust and compliance. The capability of the team. I wrote them with conviction and hung plans off each one, the way you do in December, when the year ahead is a clean sheet and plans feel like promises.
Half a year later, every objective is alive, and almost none of the plans survived contact with the year.
Take the trust building. The plan said one significant training each quarter. The first quarter delivered exactly that, our first NVC training, a day that brought real tensions to the surface and gave us language for them. The second quarter delivered no training at all. What it delivered instead was something nobody had scheduled. Out of conversations that kept circling the same question, who is actually carrying what, a practice emerged that we've started calling the Responsibility Radar: each person assessing for themselves where their ownership genuinely lies, rather than where the org chart says it should. The team sits down with the full picture a few days after the solstice. It isn't a training. It's closer to a mirror, and it's doing the work the trainings were meant to do.
The other objectives tell versions of the same story. Compliance found fronts I hadn't mapped, and the partnerships matured through relationships that arrived sideways rather than down the pipeline I'd sketched. Reading the December entry back, what strikes me is that the objectives were never really plans. They were intents, written wider than I realised. And intents, it turns out, behave like water. The destination holds. The route finds itself, around obstacles I couldn't see from the mountain top, through terrain that only revealed itself by being travelled.
The Same Water, Closer In
There was a fourth objective in that December entry, quieter than the others because it was mine alone. To grow into the leader who can deliver a hard truth without diminishing anyone. I framed it then as a skill to acquire, the skill of difficult conversations, and I imagined acquiring it the way you do in December: practice, feedback, improvement.
What actually happened ran a different route. That first NVC training wasn't only for the team. I carried on afterwards in personal coaching with the same trainer, sessions that weren't training and weren't therapy but something closer to this journal made audible, the unfinished thinking spoken until it finished itself. Those months were the build-up to China, where the whole thing landed in the body rather than the head. And the lesson China returned was almost the inverse of what I'd set out to learn. I wanted to get better at speaking. I grew by learning to receive.
The objective held. The route ran through silence rather than speech, through listening rooms and train windows rather than conversation technique. Water again. I set the intent at the mountain top and the year chose its own way down.
The Shadow in the Water
And here is where I have to be careful with myself, because I notice how comfortable this story is becoming in my mouth. Intents behave like water, the route finds itself, the plan was never the point. It's true. It is also exactly what I would say if I had simply failed to do the thing I promised. The training that never happened in the second quarter became the Responsibility Radar, and I can call that emergence. I could also be calling drift wisdom, teaching myself that whatever happened was what was meant to happen all along. There is a shadow in the water metaphor, and the shadow is that a leader who always finds the silver lining is a leader nobody can hold to anything.
I don't yet know where the line runs between trusting the route and excusing the detour. What I know is that the question has started to make me uncomfortable, and I've come to trust that discomfort more than the serenity it interrupts.
Maximum Light
So this is how I want to arrive at the solstice. Not with conclusions, the real review comes after, once the retrospectives have spoken. Just with the pattern clear in my hands, and the question held open beside it.
A few days after the longest day, the team will hold up the Responsibility Radar, and each person will look honestly at what they are and aren't carrying. I can't ask that of them and quietly exempt myself. This entry is me going first, holding the same mirror up to my own year, including the parts where I can't yet tell wisdom from alibi. It feels like the only honest way to lead a practice like that. You walk into the light before you ask anyone else to.
The stretch ahead is solar, expansive, outward, the way I described it in the spring when I wrote about tracking moon cycles alongside product cycles. The eclipse still waits over Europe in August. And something has begun to move these last few weeks, a conversation arriving from a direction I wasn't watching, the kind that could give a European push the fuel to actually become European. I'm not going to name it. It's still more pressure than shape, something under the surface I can feel without being able to read. To name it now would be to start steering it, and I've just spent six months learning what that costs when I do it too early.
So I'll wait for the light. Between here and the eclipse sits the longest day, and I mean to stand in it empty-handed, the way the trip taught me. Maximum light is for seeing, not for steering. Whatever is rising will show its shape when there's enough light to see by, and I'd rather receive it whole than reach for it half-formed.
Whatever wants to come through next, the desk is clear.
With care, Ben