The Somatic CEO: Why Your Q4 Fatigue Is a Mandate for Redesign, Not Rest

A quiet frustration settles in corner offices across the world right now. It’s the end of a year defined by noise—AI hype, geopolitical uncertainty, inflation volatility—and the understandable impulse is to wait. You feel tired not just because you’ve worked hard, but because your business is fighting itself.

The truth is, this quiet window is not a time to pause. It’s the single greatest opportunity to define your next decade of success. The temptation is to demand people “collaborate more” or make 10% across-the-board cuts. But these actions merely perpetuate the old, flawed muscle memory of your organization.

What we need now is a somatic redesign: the intentional creation of new, hard-wired connections—in your technology, your processes, and your people. This allows your organization to move without the friction that is currently draining your executive energy.

And here’s the deeper truth many leaders feel but rarely name:

The good thing about this: It starts with you. The bad thing about this: It starts with you.

This is Neural Friction — the tension between your speed as a leader and the slower rhythm your organization is wired for.

The measures and structure of your organization set the ceiling for what your people do. While you may be running to catch up or ducking to manage market changes, your frameworks are lagging behind.

Success depends entirely on the speed and clarity of an organization’s internal wiring. Every time an employee is forced to follow a convoluted, siloed process, the brain reinforces that painful path. This repeated behavior entrenches old, slow synaptic connections throughout the company. This is about taking responsibility for the rewiring so the organization can move at the pace the market now demands.

Passion and willpower are powerful, but they fade. Individual effort has taken you as far as it can. Executives must address the structural bottlenecks they have been compensating for so that new neural paths (new connections, even if from existing learnings) feel natural from the first week of the new year.

This isn’t theory; it is the critical prerequisite for competitive execution.

This is the connection of those who love change and those who hate change — neither are right, but when structurally connected they can all find a path forward.

The reason your leadership feels stuck is not the market; it’s the unaddressed structural friction created by a business model designed for a predictable world.

Common Structural Friction Draining Your Organization — you will recognize from your world

If your organization feels heavy, slow, and expensive, it’s not a failure of effort; it’s often a failure of connection. This Q4 fatigue is a direct result of three structural anxieties:

-The Strategy/Journey Gap

You spent millions on a strategy deck declaring priorities, yet as external pressures mounted, priorities blurred. When everything is a priority, nothing is. Money, effort, and attention are spread so thin that standards disappear.

Some think things are happening too fast and that time is needed to anchor the change. Some are impatiently waiting for others to ‘wake up’ — but patience is not expecting time to change the situation; active patience is holding the direction steady while removing the barriers that slow progress.

-The Capability Fog

In uncertainty, the impulse is to control headcount — a reflex inherited from decades of budgeting. This leads to cuts without clarity, which creates fear and paralyzes the workforce.

Many prepare for a 5–10% reduction without articulating the three to five critical capabilities the remaining organization must master. Without this clarity, people cling to the past because the future feels undefined.

When you focus on the size of the organization instead of the shape of the work, you are treating the symptom, not the cause. Without reshaping the structure, the remaining people simply inherit old constraints.

-The AI Integration Illusion

Your teams ran impressive AI pilots this year. The technology works. Yet enterprise ROI has stalled. You have realized that AI delivers an answer in seconds, but your processes still require days, and when you automated the first step of a broken workflow, you didn’t redesign the pathway around it.

This is like introducing speed into a system still governed by slow reflexes — much like increasing muscle strength without stabilizing the core: the organization gains power, but not control.

Three Levers for Somatic Redesign

Instead of just surviving the next quarter, this quiet window is your chance to establish the scaffolding for 2026. The goal is not to push people harder, but to redesign the internal wiring so the organization can move without the friction that exhausted it this year. These three structural levers offer a practical way forward.

1. Deconfigure your business into its underlying capabilities — then reassemble them for the model ahead.
   Most organizations still steer through yesterday’s structure: business units, job titles, product silos, inherited accountability. But the real strategic advantage lies in knowing what value you bring. Map your true capabilities — demand generation, supply orchestration, data interpretation, service delivery, partnership motion. Strengths become visible, duplication becomes obvious, scaling possible, and untapped potential surfaces.

   This also allows for redeployment of existing capabilities into new propositions without building more headcount. It is the structural equivalent of separating muscle from habit: once you see the true anatomy of the business, you can assemble it to compete in a new context rather than stretching outdated roles beyond their limits.

   This was the case when French carmaker Renault outpaced their industry through carefully assessing their strengths and deploying their capabilities to scale with partners ahead of the market — while others clung to their engineering history and lost customers, technical edge, and value.

2. Redraw the connection points around the work, not the org chart.
   Transformation does not fail because people resist change. It fails because the system keeps routing work through seams that no longer make sense. Redesign the junction points where work actually flows — customer journeys, product configurations, customer segments, messaging hierarchies, capital re-allocations.

   These become the new connecting structures where teams align around shared outcomes instead of defending boundaries. Shift the structural anchor from “who owns what” to “what value must move,” and alignment increases, energy returns, and the organization moves with consistency. This is how boundaries become design elements rather than obstacles.

   When logistics giant Maersk set out to integrate logistics, it required not only a combination of businesses and brands, but also a new common reference in relatable, shared customer segments; an understanding of how one team’s efforts to win business were lost if another team would not prioritize their handling; and clarity on how every product needed to show up coherently on one small mobile webpage. What had been efficient BUs or functions began to see shared interdependencies and moved together. This shift would not have worked without new shared re-frames to connect through.

3. Create a shared reflex at the few moments that decide everything.
   Every organization has three or four structural choke points — the moments and settings where decisions slow, uncertainty spikes, and initiatives quietly stall. These aren’t cultural issues; they are system-design issues. Map the exact sequence, inputs, authorities, and timing for the decisions that consistently derail momentum and reinforce past narratives — which, if not addressed head-on, will be defaulted to. These might include customer allocations, capital deployment, or promotions.

   If ambition is clear, then digitizing these decision points should be clear too, allowing the organization to move together and build far more rhythm and predictability. The business stops burning energy on negotiation and starts conserving it for shared progress. This is steering at its most practical: reducing variability where velocity must be high and building surplus for the moments that set the trajectory of the year.

   As an example, when handling scarce luxury products, one knows that allocation will make or break a market — but understanding which drivers guide this, and taking full responsibility for the global optimal solution, not only avoids waiting and disappointment, it lifts accountability across the organization and creates a shared somatic acceleration.

Your Chance to Create the Muscle Memory Your Organization Needs to Win

You can let Q4 fatigue guide you into a stall — repeating familiar structures that can’t survive the next shock.

Or you can use this moment of quiet to redesign the internal wiring of your business.

Leadership today isn’t about pushing people harder.

It’s about removing the structural friction that makes progress exhausting and actively building the new synaptic connections your teams need to execute.

The leaders who will win are the ones who use this reset moment to create the muscle memory their organizations need to move, pivot, and outperform.

Which future will you design?

Written by Louisa Loran.