Monday, again…
September: everyone is back. Tanned, rested, resolved.
Gyms call it their second Christmas: people pay twelve months in advance for a body they can already picture. What they are really buying is not fitness but the illusion of progress: a membership card, a training plan and a very good first week.
Something similar happens at work. It is offsite season: strategy days, away days, let's-realign-before-year-end days. Teams come home with a great vision, five priorities and a wall of sticky notes photographed for the shared drive.
For a few days it works, because the offsite is itself a different system: laptops closed, one room, lunch shared, decisions made across a table rather than across a dozen email threads.
Then Monday arrives with the same inbox, the same meetings, the same decks. The goals change. The system doesn't. And the system always wins.
“A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
And AI isn't helping — at least not yet. Mostly, it gives the old system more of the same, only faster: longer documents, summaries of meetings that shouldn't have happened, slides about the slides. Rather than changing the system, it is cementing it. Used differently, it could help us build a new one.
Worse still, what teams carry home may be part of the problem. Gabriele Oettingen's research shows that the more vividly we picture reaching a goal, the less likely we are to get there — the brain takes the image as partial payment.
The alternative is far less glamorous: name what will stop you, and decide now what you will do when it does. Not a better goal. A better system.
At The Human Atelier, we don't just design the offsite. We also design the Monday after.
For teams, that means facilitation and our half-day Clear the (un)clear: work on the system rather than the goals — what to stop, what to finish, what changes on Monday. We come back afterwards to check what did.
And something new, for individuals: Change how you change — one-to-one coaching, action-driven. We don't talk about what you want to change. We change it — and we train you at it.
Already the end of September, you probably already know which goals won't make it. That is the honest place to start. Name the one thing most likely to stop you — and decide what you'll do about it. Today is as good a Monday as any.