Up & Out #10: Closing Up & Out: The Year-End Survival Edition
Thought Leadership
December 16, 2025
A gently satirical “how-to” guide for intelligence teams who have made it to December on fumes, caffeine, and sheer professional stubbornness.
This Up & Out series has explored what it takes to elevate intelligence from reactive to strategic: shaping decisions, building influence, and proving why this craft matters. As we close out 2025, we’re shifting gears to survival mode.
Because impact starts with resilience. And what is resilience without rest, reflection and laughter?
1. Start With Permission: You May Sit Down
Private-sector intelligence teams are resource-constrained, overcommitted, and often powered by adrenaline, deadlines, and a personality flaw known as “sure, I can take that on.”
So, consider this your formal, strategic, leadership-approved permission slip: You may rest.
Rest is not a dereliction of duty. Rest is how you maintain the cognitive horsepower that executives think you magically produce on command.
This year, we talked about elevating intelligence, strategic positioning, and showing up as a whole-of-business function. None of that works when you’re completely burnt out. No one influences the C-suite effectively when they’re running on fumes and existential dread.
Take the breather. Call it “resetting the analytic aperture for 2026.” It sounds professional because it is.
2. Avoid the Tyranny of the Urgent
A core Up & Out theme this year was learning not to operate solely in reactive crisis mode. So, your year-end homework is this: Identify one thing you can stop doing. * Not in a passive-aggressive way (though tempting) but in a “we are a strategic function and therefore allocate resources with discipline” way.
Examples you may want to borrow:
- “We’re pausing daily summaries until January so we can sharpen our 2026 intelligence requirements.” (You could use this pause to realign your products to better reflect the priorities identified in your Annual Forecast.)
- “We’re replacing 19 ad hoc requests with one quarterly forward-looking brief.”
- “We’re deleting that one Slack channel where people panic-post random news articles without context.”
Strategic restraint is a leadership behaviour. It’s also the only way you won’t greet December 22 with that all-too-familiar thousand-yard stare.
*Extra credit if you can identify more than one thing!
3. Add Humour for Sanity
We don’t often talk about humour in intelligence work, but humour is an antidote to cognitive overload. Your team deserves joy that isn’t solely derived from sourcing a hard-to-find document at 2 a.m.
So, we endorse—not as medical professionals but as professionals who study human decision-making—controlled, intentional, morale-boosting nonsense.
Examples:
- Declare a “No Geopolitical Doom After 3 pm” rule for one week. And when the inevitable geopolitical doom occurs after 3 pm, require a ridiculous—yet somehow plausible—backstory for the incident. Extra points if it involves a rogue intern, a goat, or the lyrics to a Taylor Swift song.
- Replace Friday stand-up with “What’s the wildest thing a consumer asked for this year?” therapy hour. (No names. Just vibes. And maybe pseudonyms from a team-favourite TV show).
- Create a Bingo card of your team’s 2025 recurring fire drills and include the exact quotes that triggered them. Then read the quotes out of context for a little levity.
- Start every meeting with a “meme of the day” or a wholesome cat video. (Must be at least 20% relatable to your job or 80% adorable—either qualifies as morale support. Think: something involving cats, geopolitics, or cats reacting to geopolitics.)
Humour is not frivolous. It’s a resilience tool.
4. Reconnect to the Strategic ‘Why’
A year-end breather isn’t just about rest. It’s also a chance to zoom out and reconnect with the reason your team exists in the first place. Our previous editions of Up & Out have highlighted the importance of building systems, shaping decisions, and positioning intelligence as a whole-of-business partner—not just a security support function.
Use this “operationally-calmer-but-we-would-never-use-the-q-word” period to reflect on the work that mattered, the insights that made a difference, and the impact your team had across the enterprise.
Here are a few prompts to guide that reflection:
- What moved the needle this year? Not what was loudest or even the most stressful, but what objectively delivered value.
- Where did we add enterprise-wide impact (within and beyond security)? Strategy, operations, supply chain, market entry, brand risk—anywhere your work landed and stuck.
- How did our insights influence decisions? Identify the briefings, products, or conversations that shifted understanding or shaped action.
- Where were we proactive vs. reactive? And what conditions, workflows, or partnerships made those proactive moments possible?
- What can we build now to win, not scramble through 2026? Requirements frameworks, product roadmaps, intake governance, briefing calendars—anything that gives Future You a fighting chance.
The holiday lull can also be a great time to connect with colleagues who aren’t usually on your radar. Global teams pause at different times (Christmas, Chinese New Year, Ramadan, etc.), so use this moment to build relationships. If you’re at a holiday party, treat it as an engagement opportunity: join other teams’ events or invite them to yours. A quick chat over drinks can spark reflection and ideas for collaboration in the new year.
This is where rest becomes strategic. Slowing down enough to think creates the clarity, alignment, and focus that January demands.
In short: less chaos, more intention. The 2026 version of your team (and the wider organisation) will thank you.
5. Your 2025 Growth Was Real—Honour It
Before you run headlong into 2026, take a moment to acknowledge the progress your team made this year. Growth in the intelligence function often happens under the radar—incremental improvements in process, influence, and strategic posture that don’t always get celebrated in the rush of daily demands. But those gains matter. They compound and set the foundation for the work ahead.
Throughout this Up & Out series, we focused on strengthening the capabilities that position intelligence as a true organisational asset, not a reactive support service. Among other things, we aimed to support you in:
- Deepening your executive engagement: Sharpening briefings, helping insights land more effectively, and building trust at higher levels of the business.
- Clarifying—or building—your intelligence requirements frameworks: Defining what matters, aligning with business priorities, and creating the structure that makes your team’s work more strategic, not scattered.
- Practicing selective “no’s” and stronger prioritisation: Making thoughtful trade-offs, managing expectations, and reinforcing that focus. This is a leadership behaviour, not a luxury.
- Positioning intelligence as a leadership discipline, not a reporting function: Shaping decisions, influencing strategy, and underscoring that intelligence is about driving understanding, not just producing products.
Even if you didn’t transform each of these areas overnight, the shifts you made this year matter. Progress in intelligence is rarely dramatic; it’s cumulative and built from dozens of small choices, realignments, and intentional course corrections. Those incremental gains are what strengthen your foundation and expand your influence over time.
So, honour that momentum. You charted a smarter, more strategic path in 2025, and you can continue refining and expanding it in 2026. None of this requires perfection; it just requires consistency, clarity, and the willingness to keep steering the function toward bigger impact.
And that’s exactly why a pause—some rest, reflection, and even laughter—isn’t indulgent. It’s how you sustain the high-impact work you’re doing in a very messy world. Regroup to breathe while you can. Remember: long-term influence is a marathon, not an adrenaline sprint.
The work you do matters more than it often gets credit for, and it has the potential to shape decisions in ways that ripple far beyond your immediate remit. Humour, reflection, and strategic rest aren’t distractions. They’re part of the craft!
We’ll be back in the new year with more thought content to help intelligence professionals think smarter and lead bolder. Until then, rest up and take care.
