Last week I sat in a Q3 kickoff where a marketing lead shared her screen and opened a deck last modified in October. Slide four showed a competitive set that included a company acquired in February. Nobody said anything. We went to slide five.
It is July 1. Half the year is gone, and that deck has been describing a world that stopped existing sometime around tax season.
This happens because of how the document gets made. Annual plans are written in the fall by people who are exhausted, negotiated in December by people protecting headcount, and approved in January by people who need a number for a board deck. By the time it is signed it has stopped being a strategy and started being a treaty.
Treaties are defended. Strategies are tested.
The annual plan is a hypothesis with a date on it, and the mid-year mark is the only moment anyone is willing to check whether it survived contact.
So check it. Not with a full replan, which nobody has the appetite for in July, but with three questions asked out loud in a room where somebody takes notes.
First: what did we assume that turned out to be wrong? Not what missed target. What was believed. Category growth, a competitor's pricing, how fast a retail partner would move. Write the wrong assumption on the wall. It is the only genuinely new information you have.
Second: what worked that we did not plan? Every brand I have worked with has one of these by June. A channel that overperformed, a product nobody merchandised that keeps selling, a message that landed sideways. Liquid Death did not plan its way into being a live-music brand. It followed the evidence and then paid for it properly.
Third: what are we still funding out of loyalty to the document? This is the uncomfortable one. There is always a line item alive purely because cutting it means admitting the fall version was wrong. Kill it. Nobody outside the room will notice, and everyone inside it will feel five pounds lighter.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, and the pattern holds. Teams that reopen the plan in July look disorganized in July and look prescient in November. Teams that defend it look disciplined all summer and spend December explaining.
Treaties are defended. Strategies are tested.
I did my own version on Sunday at Stumptown on Belmont, with a cortado and a printed copy of what I told myself January would lead to. Roughly a third of it is still true. That is a good year. I crossed out the rest in pen, which is the part that matters, because pen means you are not planning to argue with yourself about it again in August.