Hello friends,

Welcome to Theory of Change, and welcome to a new year.

Looking back over my 2025 goals, I should be happy. I hit my main goals (1000 newsletter subs, 1000 YouTube subscribers, 1000km of trails run). My agency profit rose by 17.6% (pointlessly specific) and, by some miracle, my partner said I’d been less stressed and more present at home.

But it didn’t feel like that. I spent most of November wading through some existential depression, and most of December either in hospital, in physio, or in despair after a largely unsuccessful operation.

And so, the year of our lord 2025 felt unsatisfactory and unsuccessful.

Some of this is down to my cognitive and psychological make-up. I’m prone to the darker interpretations, to pessimistic outlooks, to catastrophising.

But a lot of it is down to the way we (meaning, I) set yearly goals. The prevailing knowledge says we need to set SMART goals, KPIs, and OKRs for our lives the same way we do for our organisations.

I’m not convinced.

In this edition, I’m going to tell you why, give you some alternative frameworks, and show you how my new approach is transforming the strategy for this newsletter in 2026.

WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE

This urge to metricise my life didn’t come from nowhere. It’s a spillover from my product management days, Silicon Valley productivity culture, and the actually very reasonable idea that “what gets measured gets managed”.

There's truth to this. Targets and win conditions have their place. The entire industrial complex around impact measurement and productivity exist for a reason.

But, over time, as this logic escaped my beautifully-coloured professional spreadsheets and colonised my personal life, my new year planning turned into an annual performance review, and those numbers, even the green up-and-to-the-right ones were hiding other realities. Real life remained unaccounted for.

WHERE IT FALLS APART

Yearly goals assume a level of predictability and control that simply doesn’t exist in my life. They flatten complex, uneven human experience into tidy scorecards that can’t account for life’s many messy interventions. Illness, grief, burnout, political chaos, children, ageing parents? Bad luck kiddo, none of these fit neatly into a KPI framework.

And even when none of that happens, the model still fails. Sometimes we can be “winning” on paper while quietly failing other parts of ourselves. The part that feels disconnected. The part that senses the scattered impact of our work isn’t enough. The part that wonders whether we’ve routined our lives into a kind of predictable boredom. Where, exactly, do those feelings sit in an OKR?

A BETTER WAY TO THINK ABOUT IT

So, instead of treating a year like a project plan, with swim lanes that I can succeed or fail in, I’ve started to get comfortable using values-based metrics (AKA vibes) to plan my year. I set intentions not resolutions, and I'm more concerned about directions of travel than some kind of precog wayfinding (Minority Report mention? Unexpected).

Planning (which I, as you will see, still love to do) then becomes less about prediction and control, and more about orientation and responsiveness: who do I want to be available to, what do I want to protect, and what kinds of energy do I want to be generating or conserving as the year unfolds?

TRY IT THIS WEEK

If this resonates, then perhaps start here. Firstly, January is a terrible month to do year-planning. Kids are back to school, immune systems are low, you’ve conceptual debt hanging over from last year, and everybody and their mother needs face time, updating, and delegating to.

So I recommend starting in February with the following:

1. Use Level 10 life or Year Compass to reflect on areas for growth and stability and retraction.

2. Set yourself some intentions (mine are to bring more purpose, belonging, and adventure into my life. Deliberately vague!).

3. Establish a keyword that acts as a guiding principle (mine is “spacious”, as in: I’d like to give myself space to think more slowly and deeply this year about the things I do).

4. If you do respond well to plans, as I do, consider turning key areas of your life into micro-intentions with actual Goals, Plans and Systems (Ali Abdaal’s video on his GPS framework is good).

But - and here's the key! - feel free to push back against any pressure, internal or external, to metricise or operationalise any of this. You can, but you don’t have to. You are not an NGO.

If you want to see what this looks for me in practice this year, you can check out my year-planning board on Miro. (I’m 95% sure there’s nothing deeply private or incriminating on there, but let me know if you find something that is!).

🌊 WAVE GOODBYE 🌊

So, what does this all mean for this newsletter?

Well, my desire for this “cognitive luxury” of spaciousness (as Anne Laure Le Cunff calls it), has a couple of repercussions.

1. I’m reducing the frequency to fortnightly for the foreseeable future. People have said they don’t always get time to read every edition in-depth. And I’m not sure the weekly cadence is doing anything for subscriber growth. So I will take an extra week each time to make sure the newsletter is half as frequent but 2x as valuable. (I’m thinking a lot about heavy vs light creation at the moment).

2. I’m going to be covering topics that I’m dealing with right now. For instance, I just took up a fractional executive role at Report For The World where I will be working on sustainable scale, organisational design, innovative fundraising, commons-influenced structures, and more. As I hit problems and (hopefully) overcome them, I’ll be sharing them here. Same format, same writing style, but now based on IRL challenges that the organisation and I are working through.

In some ways, nothing changes. You’ll still be getting a newsletter of sharp reframes and tiny experiments to help you build a purpose-driven organisation that funders trust, teams love, and communities actually need.

And I’ll be getting a space to build and think in public.

The difference is this year that space will be... well, a little more spacious for both of us.

Best,

Adam

p.s. If you were forwarded this, welcome! Sign up to receive this newsletter every other Thursday here.

p.p.s Thanks to everyone who attended the Design Your Year session I co-hosted with Anita Zielina on Monday. I just love the community we're building there!