Monday Momentum · Week 5, Q2 2026
There is a specific kind of weight that comes when multiple things are failing at once, and none of them are within your control.
My dad’s recovery is slow. The family is stretched. Work is doing what it does when attention gets divided — teams drift, priorities fragment, and the common direction you spent months building starts to feel like something you said in a talk rather than something you’re actually living. The gap between what I profess and what I see in front of me this week is not comfortable.
It would be dishonest to dress this up.
There’s a term from change management — the valley of despair. It’s the dip between the initial excitement of a commitment and the moment it starts to actually produce results. Everyone passes through it. The question is whether you recognise it for what it is: a feature of the process, not evidence that the process is wrong.
I recognise it.
What I’ve learned from years of leading people in the mountains — on rock, on snow, in weather that doesn’t care about your schedule — is that the moment everything seems to pull in different directions is precisely when the role of direction-setter matters most. Not by forcing convergence, and not by pretending the fragmentation isn’t real. But by staying oriented. By keeping the compass visible even when no one’s looking at it.
This week that compass is doing double duty.
The thing keeping me functional is, oddly, writing. Working on a different perspective for Idea 5 — genuinely different, not just a reframe — is forcing precision at a moment when everything else is asking me to be imprecise. The Fab Campaigns product development work and the AI governance piece are similarly clarifying. When the ground shifts underfoot, a clear deliverable is an anchor.
So that’s the plan for this week. Not heroics. Not a dramatic pivot. Just: carry everything forward, progress what can be progressed, protect what matters, and get to next Monday without having broken any part.
That’s what survival looks like when you’re doing it right.
The valley is real. The other side exists. You don’t get there by standing still and you don’t get there by sprinting. You get there by keeping moving.
One step. Then the next.
Monday Momentum publishes weekly on fabrizio.deliberali.com