Personal Strategy Compass June 2026
The Halftime Locker Room: When the Game Changes
The Halftime Locker Room: When the Game Changes
The Unanticipated Opponent
With the 2026 World Cup officially underway, watching the tactical battles has reminded me of a truth every great coach knows. The game is rarely won in the opening minutes. It is often won or lost in the locker room at halftime.
Imagine a team that spends weeks drawing up a brilliant game plan for a defensive, counter-attacking opponent. But when the whistle blows, the opponent comes out playing a relentless, high-pressing offensive style. If the team stubbornly tries to run their original plays, they will get crushed. They must survive until halftime, get into the locker room, look at what is happening on the pitch, and draw up a completely new formation.
Your professional year operates the exact same way. We sit down in January and draw up an elegant game plan for the year we think we will have. Then the field conditions change. The opponent, whether it is the disruption of generative AI, shifting economic realities, or the sudden emergence of unignorable personal life transitions, comes out playing a style we had not anticipated.
We are conditioned to believe that sticking to our original goals is a sign of discipline. However, when the game changes, running your January playbook in June is a failure to adapt that we want to categorize as discipline and persistence.
The mid-year Personal Quarterly Offsite (PQO) is your designated halftime. It is a structured, intentional pause to step off the field, look at the game tape without judgment, and adjust to the reality of the game you are actually in.
Playing the Unexpected Game
When I sat down for my Q1 PQO earlier this year, I had a very clear plan. Looking back at my actual reality today, I see that almost none of the most profound developments of my year were on that January whiteboard. We must recognize that rigid adherence to an obsolete resource allocation model creates its own set of risks that can start cascading if we don’t change course.
It doesn’t have to be an unanticipated opponent crisis. Sometimes it is a string of unexpected variables and profound operational shifts that your old playbook simply is not designed to handle. In just the last few months, my field conditions shifted dramatically in both positive and negative ways:
Institutional Recognition: I was named Director Emeritus of the Michigan State University Center for Law, Technology & Innovation, a meaningful milestone and honor marking the conclusion of that specific chapter.
Capacity Constraints: Teaching my spring class at the University of Michigan Law School yielded immense professional satisfaction, but it also delivered a clear diagnostic signal that I needed to step away from teaching to protect my baseline vitality.
The Low AI Project: My David Bowie Low AI album series of blog posts took off. Based on my framework of using the Low album as a metaphor for discovering and mastering the instrument, it evolved from a side note into a major, high-demand node of personal intellectual energy.
Geographic Relocation: My wife Colleen and I are packing up our Ann Arbor apartment and executing a major relocation to Garrett, Indiana, where I grew up, to be close to family.
If I blindly insisted on running my January playbook today, I would be fighting the reality of my own life. I would be trying to execute a plan for a field I am no longer standing on.
My Halftime Adjustment: Retiring the “Fixer”
The hardest part of the Halftime PQO is having the courage to abandon a play you spent a lot of time designing. That’s where I’ve found myself.
As I looked at my upcoming move to Indiana and the complex season ahead, I realized I had defaulted to my old playbook. I was trying to treat this massive, infinite life transition as a finite problem to be fixed and squeezed into my existing professional schedule.
During my recent special mid-year planning session before my upcoming Q3 PQO, I realized the only way to win the second half of the year was to change my formation completely. I had to step out of the Fixer role and embrace a new reality as a Steward, focusing on maintaining the stability of my family and my own biological baseline.
To do that, I had to make some hard choices about subtraction. I permanently retired several high-status professional commitments to ensure I had the cognitive bandwidth needed to play the new game in front of me. Walking away required a conscious decision to write off the unrecoverable time and reputational capital already invested rather than compounding the loss. This newsletter survived the ablations with flying colors.
Practical Tool: The Halftime Locker Room Questionnaire
During your mid-year PQO, take 20 minutes to sit in the locker room and answer these three questions honestly:
The Game Tape Review: What really happened in Q1 and Q2? Look closely and ask if your biggest wins were the ones you planned for or if they were unexpected surprises.
The New Formation: How has your opponent changed styles since January? (Have AI advancements, firm economics, shifting role expectations, or personal life changes altered the field?)
The Subtraction Play: What high-status commitment are you currently maintaining solely out of inertia? What is the specific stranded asset you have been hesitant to write off, and what must you permanently retire before the third quarter begins and it wears you down?
Closing Thought
The third quarter begins on July 1. Running out onto the field with a playbook that expired in March is just an expensive way to mismanage your attention.
Take twenty minutes this week to look at what actually happened in the first half of your year. Name the real game you are in, write off the stranded assets, and adjust your formation for the field you are standing on.
About Personal Strategy Compass
Personal Strategy Compass is a free email newsletter about Personal Quarterly Offsites, focusing on practical ways to step back from execution and think more clearly about where you are investing your strategic attention. Each issue is a field note, capturing something I am testing, noticing, or learning in my own planning life, translated into something you might try in yours.