June has a very different personality from January.
January arrives full of energy, fresh calendars and ambitious plans. June arrives with open spreadsheets, crowded calendars and the growing suspicion that half the year disappeared while everyone was in another alignment meeting.
If you remember, back in January we spent some time talking about pace. We agreed, with fresh notebooks and plenty of optimism, that human energy is not an infinite resource. We liked the idea that the year didn’t need to be won in the first few weeks, but simply carried, thoughtfully, month by month. It was a comforting idea at the time, although February, March, April and May clearly had other plans.
Somewhere around the middle of March, many organizations quietly enter what could be called the “We’re Already Behind” phase. Nothing dramatic has happened, no major crisis has appeared, yet everyone somehow starts behaving as if December is only three weeks away.
We tell ourselves that if we can just push through this week, next week will finally calm down. Unfortunately, next week has already looked at your calendar and has other plans.
Then another meeting appears. And another one. Not necessarily to make decisions, but to understand why we no longer have time to make them. The calendar fills up, the inbox never quite empties, and the feeling that everyone is incredibly busy becomes increasingly convincing. People leave with longer action lists and one less hour available to complete them.
Then, almost inevitably, comes Maria.
Every company has a Maria. She knows where everything is, why things work the way they do and who to call when something unexpected happens. At some point, someone casually says, “Don’t worry, Maria knows,” and that is usually the moment when the organization discovers that far too much of its stability depends on one person never taking a proper holiday.
What makes the middle of the year particularly interesting is that the cost of a bad pace behaves exactly as it did in January: it arrives politely. Nothing suddenly falls apart, but the first signs begin to appear. Conversations become shorter, emails become more functional than thoughtful, and decisions are made a little faster, not because they are clearer, but because everyone wants one less item sitting in the inbox. Problems are no longer solved immediately; they are moved into another meeting, another document or another conversation scheduled for next week. Somehow, this still feels like progress because everyone is busy.
The real test usually arrives with the summer holidays. If the honest answer to the question, “What happens while the key people are away?” is “Let’s hope nothing breaks,” then the organization probably isn’t managing its pace as much as depending on good luck.
Choosing a sustainable pace in June is much harder than choosing it in January because the year has now become real. Plans have met reality, some priorities have changed, some projects turned out to be much bigger than expected, and some people have quietly carried far more than anyone originally intended. That is precisely why June offers such a useful opportunity to stop for a moment and ask better questions, not because everything needs to be redesigned, but because small adjustments made now are usually far easier than major corrections in October.
Where are we using speed instead of improving a process?
Which “heroic efforts” have quietly become part of our normal way of working?
Where are we depending on individual knowledge instead of building shared understanding?
And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all: if two key people switched off their phones for two weeks, would work continue, or would everyone suddenly discover just how much they actually knew?
The middle of the year is not asking us to lower our ambition. It is simply asking us to check whether the pace we chose in January is still the pace we are actually living.
So before everyone disappears for a well-earned summer break, try one small experiment. Find the person everyone refers to with, “Don’t worry, Maria knows,” and imagine that Maria is enjoying two uninterrupted weeks on a beach with her phone switched off. If that picture makes you even slightly uncomfortable, you have probably just identified one of your most important projects for the second half of the year.
And if you happen to be Maria, please do everyone a favour and book that holiday. Your colleagues may grumble for a few days, but your organization will probably learn far more from two weeks without you than from another two-hour alignment meeting.