Closing 2025: When Agreement Stops Being the Hard Part

The meeting looks different when the numbers finally behave.

You can feel it in the room. The usual friction isn’t there. Nobody is arguing about which report is “right.” Nobody is burning time relitigating definitions. The dashboard is clean. The trend lines make sense. Someone asks a sharp question and the answer comes back fast.

And then the moment hits that still surprises people the first time they see it.
Nothing moves.

Not because leaders don’t care. Not because the data is wrong. Not because the team is lazy. The hesitation is quieter than that. It’s the pause that shows up when the organization has clarity but not conviction. When it has visibility but not direction. When it has agreement but not the muscle memory to turn agreement into action.

That gap is the real work. It’s the whole game, honestly. And it’s what 2025 kept putting in front of me, over and over, across different conversations, different initiatives, different levels of the org.

If I had to summarize what I learned this year in one line, it’s this:

...most transformation doesn’t fail in the strategy. It fails in the handoff between intention and follow-through.

We love to treat that handoff like a soft problem. A communication problem. A “change management” problem. Something we can solve with alignment meetings, steering committees, and better slides.

But the handoff isn’t soft. It’s structural.

It lives in decision rights that are implied instead of explicit. It lives in governance that exists as a calendar invite instead of a usable operating system. It lives in escalations that are treated like leadership instead of a design smell. It lives in data foundations that are “good enough” until the stakes go up, then everything becomes a debate again.

So when I talk about wanting transformation to feel less like theater and more like muscle memory, I’m not trying to be clever. I’m naming the difference between staged change and lived change.

Theater is when we perform progress. We do the kickoff. We publish the roadmap. We launch the initiative. Everyone nods. Everyone uses the right language for a few weeks. Then the system pulls us back to old behaviors because nothing underneath changed enough to hold the new way.

Muscle memory is what happens when the new way becomes the default. Not because people are inspired. Because the environment makes it easier to do the right thing than the old thing. Because thresholds are known. Because ownership is real. Because the cadence is consistent. Because the numbers are trusted and the decisions are designed, not improvised.

This year, I saw both. I saw places where we were still performing. I saw places where we were building. The difference wasn’t effort. It was structure.

One of the best signals for me is language.

Not buzzwords. Not the polished phrases people repeat to show they were in the meeting. I mean practical language. Decision language. The kind you hear when someone can prioritize without needing permission. When they can explain trade-offs without hiding behind ambiguity. When a leader can say, “Here’s what matters most this quarter, here’s what we’re not doing, and here’s how we’ll know we’re winning,” and the organization actually believes them because the system reinforces it.

In 2025, I watched our leaders start to speak more of that language. Not perfectly. Not consistently yet. But enough to feel the shift. People started to get sharper about what “priority” actually means. They started to recognize that a long list is not a strategy. They started to see that escalation is not a badge of importance. They started to understand, at a practical level, that high aspiration outcomes require a different standard of decision-making than business as usual.

That might sound small. It isn’t.

Language is a leading indicator of operating model maturity. When people don’t have shared language, they don’t have shared meaning. When they don’t have shared meaning, they don’t have shared decisions. And when they don’t have shared decisions, they don’t have execution that compounds. They have activity. They have motion. They have a lot of “work,” but it doesn’t stack.

That’s why I’ve been so focused on product mindset and operating rhythm. Not because “product” is trendy, but because it forces a discipline that transformation needs: clear ownership, persistent accountability, and a focus on outcomes over outputs.

A product mindset also changes what you reward. You stop rewarding heroic reaction and start rewarding repeatable delivery. You stop worshiping urgency and start designing for flow. You stop treating the backlog as a dumping ground and start treating it as a strategic instrument. You stop pretending everything is a priority and start making real trade-offs.

What I learned this year is that you can’t bolt that onto a system that’s still organized around handoffs, silos, and ambiguous accountability. The mindset won’t survive. The system will win.

So part of my work in 2025 was less about shipping a single “thing” and more about preparing the ground so better decisions could take root. Clarifying who owns what. Tightening how escalation works. Establishing governance that people can actually operate without feeling like they’re submitting paperwork to get permission to move.

That word “governance” is loaded for a lot of people. I get it. Most organizations have experienced governance as drag. An extra layer. A place where momentum goes to die

But usable governance is the opposite. It’s the guardrail that lets people move faster without crashing. It’s the structure that prevents every decision from becoming a bespoke negotiation. It’s the reason you can trust the operating rhythm even when the personalities in the room change.

If 2025 taught me anything, it’s that speed without structure is just churn. And structure without empathy is just bureaucracy. The goal is structure that respects reality. The messy, human, high-dependency reality of modern organizations.

This is where the “numbers” come back into the story.

Because even when you fix ownership and governance, you still hit the same wall if the data foundation isn’t strong. You can’t build conviction on shifting sand. You can’t run decision cadence if every conversation starts with, “Wait, what does this metric mean?” You can’t hold people accountable to outcomes if the measurements are inconsistent or the definitions drift across systems.

So while I don’t want to position myself as “only” a data leader, I’m not going to pretend data is a side quest either. In digital transformation, data is one of the core load-bearing beams. Not because dashboards are the point, but because shared truth is the cost of admission for coordinated action.

That’s why I spent time this year pushing toward something more durable than another report or another dashboard. A data product mindset. Something designed to stand the test of time. Something built with standards that reduce friction instead of introducing a new flavor of chaos every quarter.

When I say “data product,” I’m not talking about a fancy data mart with a new label. I mean a product that has an owner, a lifecycle, and a standard of care. Something that can be trusted. Something that can evolve without breaking the downstream consumers. Something that can scale.

And that naturally pulls you into bigger questions.

How do we set standards across data, analytics, integration, and AI so we aren’t building four different worlds that barely talk to each other? How do we create interoperability without centralizing everything into one bottleneck? How do we enable domain autonomy without allowing definition drift to quietly destroy trust?

That’s where 2026 starts to show itself.

Because if 2025 was about learning to name the gap, 2026 needs to be about closing it with cadence.

Cadence is not just a schedule. It’s a commitment to a way of operating. It’s fewer meetings, yes, but it’s also clearer thresholds, faster calls, and a rhythm that doesn’t depend on heroics.

Heroics are seductive. They make for great stories. They also create fragile systems. If your success depends on the same three people pulling late nights to keep things together, you don’t have transformation. You have exhaustion with a prettier slide deck.

Decision cadence is how you build muscle memory. You reduce the cognitive load of “what happens next” because the system answers it. You make decisions easier because the boundaries are known. You make accountability fair because ownership is clear. You make learning continuous because feedback shows up weekly, not once a quarter when it’s too late to change course.

I’m also walking into 2026 with a sharper belief about where “data mesh” fits, and where it doesn’t.

Data mesh, at its best, is not a technology move. It’s an operating model move. It’s a way to organize around domains and data products so scale doesn’t require central bottlenecks. It’s a bet that autonomy and standardization can coexist if you design the right guardrails. It’s an invitation to treat data as a product with real ownership rather than a byproduct of systems nobody really owns end-to-end.

But data mesh without discipline becomes fragmentation. Data mesh without standards becomes definition drift at scale. Data mesh without governance becomes chaos with a cool name.

So 2026, for me, is about building it the right way. Slow enough to be real. Fast enough to matter. Standards that are strict where they need to be, and flexible where they should be. Governance that protects speed instead of taxing it. A platform mindset that supports the domains without trying to control them.

If you’ve been following my writing this year, you’ve probably noticed a through-line: trust, design, direction, cadence. Different chapters of the same story. I’m not interested in transformation as a one-time event. I’m interested in transformation as an operational capability. Something that holds. Something that gets stronger, not shakier, as the organization grows.

That’s what I’m carrying out of 2025.

A deeper respect for how hard the handoff is, and how solvable it becomes when you stop treating it like a motivational problem and start treating it like a system design problem.

A clearer picture of what “alignment” really means. Not agreement in the room. Behavior in the wild.

And a sharper commitment for 2026: build decision cadence that turns clarity into motion, and motion into outcomes, without burning people out to get there.

If you’re closing out 2025 with your own version of “the numbers are clean but we still can’t move,” here’s the question I’m taking into the new year:

When your team agrees, what specifically makes follow-through optional, and what would you have to change so the next step becomes automatic?

See you next year.

Sources

Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. Wiley.

Forsgren, N., Humble, J., & Kim, G. (2018). Accelerate: The science of lean software and DevOps: Building and scaling high performing technology organizations. IT Revolution.

Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading change. Harvard Business School Press.

Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. SAGE Publications.