Before you sprint, get clear

January doesn’t need more motion. It needs alignment.

Author

Lauryn Warnick
January 08, 2026

Hey there,

January has a weird rhythm. It’s the first week of the month and I feel like it’s been January for a year. My inbox is overflowing, the calendar is double-booked, and everyone is circling back.

I’m trying hard to remember what the pause over the holiday break revealed: what actually matters, what quietly resolved itself, and what’s still sitting there waiting for attention.

When the new year kicks in, it’s tempting to jump straight into motion. But speed without alignment just multiplies confusion.

So before the rush takes over, I encourage you (because I’m encouraging myself) to take a breath. Ask what clarity looks like for your team right now. What’s the story you’re all telling about the year ahead?

Then January doesn’t become about catching up. It’s about ensuring everyone’s running in the same direction before you start the sprint.

The January Reset (5-Minute Read)

If you do nothing else this week, look at this:

  • How do different teams describe the business right now?

  • Where does that language match up?

  • Where are people making their own assumptions to fill the gaps?

January is the year’s Monday. It sets the tone. If the story is fuzzy or even muddy now, speed later only makes that problem worse.

What We’re Seeing Right Now

Patterns from client conversations

  • Teams eager to move quickly, but unclear on what matters most

  • Leaders stacking new initiatives on top of unresolved confusion

  • Different functions explaining the same priority in totally different ways

  • Strategy that exists… but hasn’t been translated into how people actually work

None of this is unusual. All of it is fixable. But it’s also not a “throw these problems into Claude and get an answer” kind of fix.

One Simple Alignment Check

Use this before you greenlight anything new:

Ask three people from different teams to explain your top priority for 2026.

Listen for the verbs they use. Are they talking about building, improving, defending, or exploring?

Pay attention to the nouns and phrases they choose. Are they describing internal wins like “streamlining operations” or “protecting our core business,” or are they talking about external outcomes such as “helping customers save time,” “making it easier for clients to grow,” or “earning deeper trust from users”?

Note where their answers overlap and where they drift.

Then, call out the difference between the inside story (how your team defines success) and the outside story (how your customers experience that success). The strongest strategies connect the two: translating internal goals into language that reflects customer needs and benefits.

If the language or focus doesn’t line up, that’s your signal to pause and realign before moving forward; otherwise, you risk building momentum in different directions.

But don’t rush to rewrite the strategy deck.

Instead, gather those differences on one page, name the patterns, and agree on a single sentence that captures what you’re actually trying to achieve. Easier said than done, I know.

Then share that sentence widely—kickoff decks, team meetings, even Slack channels—until it starts showing up in how people talk about their work.

Once everyone’s describing the same destination, the path forward gets a lot less messy.

Worth Your Time This Week

A few things we’re paying attention to

📰 Article

Forbes recently named brand clarity a top business risk — alongside cybersecurity and economic volatility. When operations and strategy align with the story you tell externally, brand value compounds, which drives higher customer choice, premium, and loyalty. That’s not a branding argument. That’s an operating one.

🛠 Tool We’re Testing

Short internal narrative check-ins with simple prompts (“If you had to explain our 2026 focus to a new hire in one sentence, what would you say?”) that surface where language breaks down across teams. Especially useful this time of year.

Tool worth checking out: Miro’s Team Alignment Map — a quick, visual way to capture how different groups interpret the same goals.

📊 Insight

The teams that settle in quickest aren’t the ones rushing out of the gate. They’re the ones that take a breath, notice what’s changed, and start moving once the direction actually makes sense.

Patagonia’s leadership did this brilliantly in late 2025. They paused new product pushes to realign around its “Earth Is Our Only Shareholder” narrative before launching its January 2026 sustainability commitments. That reset clarified priorities across teams and made every subsequent move feel intentional (Fast Company, Oct 2025).

The Villain Take

January doesn’t need heroics, just shared language. Get the story straight now: what matters, why it matters, and how you’ll know it’s working. Then, execution will feel easy. And measuring how it’s performing in market will be simple too.

If 2026 is shaping up to be a big year for you, clarity isn’t optional. The world doesn’t have time for complexity. Get clear, get an edge.

— Lauryn

P.S. If you’d like a simple way to check whether your team is aligned heading into Q1, let me know and I can share the short framework we use with clients each January.

P.P.S. If you’ve been here awhile, you may notice this is a new format we’re testing—longer, more practical, and closer to how these conversations actually show up with clients. If you read it, I’d really appreciate your feedback. Just reply and tell me what landed (or didn’t). I personally read every reply.