Before You Plan 2027, Ask What 2026 Taught You

Businesses are beginning to discuss budgets, priorities and targets for 2027. Individually, many of us are doing something similar: what do I want to achieve next year, what needs to change, and what goals should I set?

But a new year does not reset old patterns.

The habits, assumptions, unresolved problems and ways of working that shaped 2026 do not disappear on 1 January. We carry them with us. Sometimes we even build the next plan on top of them.

So before deciding what you want from 2027, there is another question worth spending some proper time on first.

What has 2026 actually taught you?

Not simply what happened. Most of us know the successes, disappointments and decisions. The more useful question is what those experiences revealed about the organisation, about the people around us, and perhaps most importantly, about ourselves.

Before the plan, understand the year

Senior leaders rarely suffer from a shortage of things to do. Their diaries are full, people need decisions and organisations keep moving. What often gets squeezed out is reflection.

Harvard Business Review has made a useful point about conducting your own year in review: if we do not deliberately reflect on what has gone before, we are more likely to repeat mistakes and less able to apply what we have learned.

So before 2026 disappears, create some space to understand it. A long walk, an hour away from the office, a train journey without opening the laptop or an early morning before everybody else arrives.

If every spare ten minutes gets swallowed by email, Teams, LinkedIn or another meeting, when exactly are you supposed to stand back and make sense of anything?

Success is surprisingly easy to waste

Start with what went well.

What are you genuinely proud of from 2026? Which decisions turned out to be good ones? Where did you perform at your best? What did your team achieve that perhaps looked unlikely twelve months ago?

Then ask: why did those things work?

Success is surprisingly easy to waste because we tend to focus on the result rather than what made it possible.

There is another danger too. Not every success deserves to be repeated.

Sometimes a good result concealed a poor process. Sometimes you succeeded because you stepped in, worked ridiculous hours or rescued something at the last minute.

The result may have been good. The lesson may not be “do that again”.

So ask yourself: what worked because of the way I led, what worked despite the way I led, and what simply happened to work this time?

Then look at what did not work. What took too much energy? What did you tolerate for too long? And what part did you play?

That is not about taking responsibility for everything that went wrong. But if the entire explanation sits somewhere outside us, there is not much we can learn from it.

Maybe you held onto something for too long rather than delegating it. Perhaps you repeatedly solved other people's problems and then became frustrated when they kept bringing them back.

Those are lessons you have already paid for. You might as well use them.

What did the year teach you about yourself?

With clients, I ask them to look at both accomplishments and disappointments because both can reveal what genuinely matters to them and point towards their values.

But values can become very easy words.

Integrity. Respect. Excellence. Family. Growth.

Fine. What do they actually mean?

If integrity matters, what does it require when raising a concern might make your life more difficult? If family matters, what happens when another evening meeting appears in the diary? If growth matters, how willing are you to hear feedback you do not agree with?

A value becomes useful when it affects a decision.

That is why I also ask clients to develop guiding principles. A value says what matters; a guiding principle says how you intend to act because of it.

They do not need to sound clever. Raise the issue earlier. Do not take responsibility back simply because doing it yourself would be quicker. Finish the important work before taking on more.

Your 2027 plan will meet the real world

Looking backwards and inwards are only part of the exercise. You also need to look outwards.

The IMF forecasts global growth of 3.4% in 2027, while the OECD expects UK growth of 1.1%. Behind those numbers sit geopolitical uncertainty and rapid technology investment.

Recent McKinsey research captures the tension well. Weak demand is now the most commonly cited risk to company growth among the executives it surveyed, while 45% say AI investment is a top leadership priority and technological change is still seen much more as a growth opportunity than a threat.

The point is not to predict the future. It is to challenge the assumptions underneath your plan.

What are you assuming about customers, costs, regulation, supply chains and technology? What happens if one of those assumptions turns out to be wrong?

What could happen early in 2027 that makes the beautifully constructed plan from December look naïve by Easter?

Good leadership is not about accurately predicting the future. It is about being able to respond when the future refuses to follow the plan.

What are you going to need to know?

Personal development often starts with: “What training should I do next year?”

I would start somewhere else.

What are you going to need to know in 2027 that you do not know today?

What capability will matter more? Where does your judgement need developing? Which conversations are you not yet equipped to have?

And what are you still doing because you are very good at it rather than because somebody in your position should still be doing it?

Leaders do not need to become technologists, but ignorance is not much of a strategy either. AI will continue changing work, roles and expectations. The useful questions are where it creates value, where judgement remains essential and what should remain distinctly human.

I will come back to that separately because it deserves a conversation of its own.

Build the picture before you write the goals

There is one more question I would ask before imagining the year ahead: What would make 2027 look successful from the outside but feel like a failure to you?

Perhaps the numbers are excellent, but you have made yourself even more indispensable to the business. Perhaps the organisation grows while your health, relationships or life outside work quietly shrink around it.

Success needs a definition before it needs a target.

Only then would I start thinking seriously about goals.

Imagine we are having a conversation towards the end of 2027 and you tell me it has been a good year. Why?

What has happened? What are you doing differently? What would the people around you say has changed? And who have you become in the process?

That is the thinking behind what I call a Growth Vision. It is not simply about a job title or one target. It is about the outcome you want, how you work and lead, the life around that work, and what others would notice has changed.

The goals can then follow. They need somewhere to point.

When they do, focus on outcomes rather than activity. There is a big difference between saying, “I will hold more delegation meetings” and saying, “My managers confidently make routine decisions without unnecessarily referring them back to me.”

One describes activity. The other describes change.

Resist creating too many. If everything matters, nothing really does.

Do not rush into 2027

Before you begin filling another year with targets, plans, meetings and activity, give yourself some time to think.

Look back and understand what 2026 taught you. Look inward at what you learned about yourself and which lessons you do not intend to pay for twice. Look outward at the environment you are likely to be leading in.

Think about what you need to learn and where you need to grow.

Then look forward. Not simply at what you want to achieve, but at the person and leader you want to be twelve months from now.

Some questions will be straightforward. Others harder. Do not rush past the difficult ones.

Some of this thinking you can do perfectly well on your own. Other parts become harder when you are too close to the decisions, assumptions and habits you are trying to examine. That is often where an external challenge helps, not by giving you the answers, but by asking the questions you are unlikely to ask yourself.

2027 will arrive whether you have thought about it or not.

You cannot control everything 2027 will bring. But you can decide whether you enter it carrying another list of intentions, or with a much clearer understanding of what needs to stay, what needs to change and who you need to become.

A new year is not a fresh start simply because the calendar says so. You have to decide what you are taking into it.

Thinking about what 2027 needs to look like for you or your organisation?

I work with senior leaders, founders and boards who need space to think, challenge their assumptions and turn that thinking into action.

Arrange a confidential conversation.