Pause + Reflection = Progress

How was 2025 for you?

Have you had time to catch breath yet and to reflect on the year just gone? 

A lot of people I know they were running on empty by the time Christmas arrived and were looking forward to switching off.

Here’s a question I’ve been discussing at home this week “What were your three best decisions of 2025?”

I’ll share mine shortly, but here’s why I think this is such a simple and powerful reflection moment.

Martin Lewis, The UK’s most trusted ‘money man’ has to put out videos disavowing social media ad scams as a fake AI-generated video is arguably found to be more believable than the real Martin Lewis.

If that doesn’t unsettle you, I don’t know what does.

I think the most unsettling part is not the scams or the technology.

It’s a quiet realisation that cues we’ve relied on for years, like a trusted face and a familiar voice are no longer reliable signals of truth.

In the 1980s, Athens was battling crippling pollution. Smog sat over the city and congestion was spiralling. 

Officials introduced what seemed like a perfectly sensible solution:

Cars with odd-numbered licence plates could drive on odd-numbered days, and even-numbered plates on even-numbered days.

For a short while, it worked. Traffic fell. Pollution dipped. Job done. Until it wasn’t.

Taking Ownership

Maybe it’s just my filter on the world, but have you noticed how so much of the public conversation slips into blame?

“It’s their fault”

“They should have fixed it”

“Poor decision making”

“Someone else is the problem”

Politics, Business, Culture….all seem to me to have the same echo, the same finger-pointing, frustration, outrage….

“God, I wish they’d show a bit more humility and just admit when they’ve got it wrong.”

Ever caught yourself saying that about someone?

Perhaps you’ve also said this about someone else:

“You have to admire their confidence, they really back themselves.”

What’s the tension between these two statements?

What do you think is the most important quality we need to face change and uncertainty?

Might it be our speed of learning and adaptation, perhaps resilience or maybe greater levels of curiousity and experimentation?

Those are all of course very good contenders to be the most important quality.

I think though, there’s something important that sits just befopre that.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent more time at events than at my desk.

Rooms packed to the rafters with energy, ideas, and stories. The buzz, the mental stimulation, the ideas, the connection with other humans.

It reminded me of something that I think is rather important.

Everywhere you look right now, it’s all about AI. Automation. Streamlining process. More efficiencies. From the Government to the Private Sector to the Third Sector. The world is about speed. Quicker answers. Quicker results. The pressure to move, to react, to get to the next thing.

I fear that in our rush to go faster, we often forget the one thing that allows us to go further.

Thinking.

Anthropic has launched Keep Thinking, its first major brand campaign for Claude.

On a flight back from an event last week, I watched Gary Neville interview Paul Scholes. Both were part of the record-breaking Manchester United team.

Neville asked him a simple question: “Who was your favourite teammate to play with?”

Scholes didn’t hesitate. “Ruud van Nistelrooy.”

Neville pressed him: “Why Ruud?”

New pencil case, freshly sharpened pencils, shiny new notebook.

Does the September back to school feeling ever leave us? 

Even now, long after schooldays, autumn for me always brings that same invitation: reset.

Resets don’t happen by accident. All too easy for the days and weeks to accelerate and our fresh energy disappears in a haze of meetings, deadlines, and obligations.