By Cathryn Lavery,Contributor,Dev Patnaik
Copyright forbes
Q4 is really just Q0 – it’s time to lock in and start focusing on concrete ways you can invest in next year’s transformation, today.
By Cathryn Lavery on Unsplash
Right now, there’s a huge movement underway with young people on Instagram and TikTok. Don’t worry—this one isn’t going to destroy democracy or give our kids body dysmorphia. It’s called the Great Lock In of 2025.
For those of us over the age of thirty, “lock in” is a term that Gen Z uses to mean getting into a state of intense focus to achieve a specific goal. Like in “I hadn’t done any of the homework for my class, but then I locked in a week before finals and got an A.” You can lock in to get better grades, land a promotion, or sculpt perfect abs at the gym.
Like many of us, a few content creators on TikTok entered 2025 with great expectations for all they might achieve, only to end the summer feeling somewhat adrift. But rather than admitting defeat, they decided it was time to get going. With typical Gen Z hustle, they declared that the Great Lock In of 2025 would start on September 1 and continue until the end of the year. Unlike New Year’s resolutions, The Great Lock In has an end date. And unlike many online challenges, the Great Lock In isn’t restricted to fitness goals. Everyone’s free to identify their own list of what they’d like to achieve. The goal is to take back control of your life in an otherwise uncertain world.
I think this is brilliant, and it’s something experienced business leaders can apply to their work. Like their Gen Z brethren, many executives are heading into the fourth quarter in a state of uncertainty and overwhelm. A year of conflicting economic signals, policy chaos around tariffs, and massive technology disruption has contributed to a sense that the year is ending before it really got started. But don’t be dismayed. It’s not time to give up. It’s time to lock in.
If you’re a future-focused leader, you’re likely carrying around some low-grade anxiety of what might happen down the road. In PwC’s most recent Global CEO Survey, 45% of respondents said their company won’t be viable in a decade if it continues along its current path. The Great Lock In is their chance to start turning that anxiety into action.
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The kids started in September. You get to start on October 1. And your finish line is still the end of the year. The fourth quarter often gets consumed by end-of-year reviews, team offsites, and strategic planning for the new year. Expectations go up while the number of working days goes down. Amid all that activity, it’s easy to lose focus. Your Lock-In list needs to counteract all that. It needs to help set you and your team up for What’s Next.
What are the three or four things you want to make happen this quarter? It’s time to make a few moves that help your organization get to the next level. If you’re focused on the future, consider what you’d like to achieve in terms of your strategy, your culture, and your leadership.
Strategy: Run One Experiment
The rapid pace of change is making it even more critical to have a future-focused strategy, not just an annual operating plan. The Great Lock In is a chance to move beyond planning and explore how your company can start to evolve in 2026. What are the big opportunities you want to grasp, whether that’s a different revenue model, a new type of customer, or a new technology? What’s your big idea?
Now, scale that big idea back to something you can try right away. Smallify your big opportunity into a real-world test. The point isn’t to win the market in Q4—it’s to learn. By the end of December, you should have either increased confidence in pursuing the opportunity, important information on how to adapt your approach, or a good reason to walk away. You’ll know more about yourself because you actually tested something. And that can help inform your direction in 2026.
Take artificial intelligence: everyone knows they need to evolve their AI transformation strategy, but where do you start when the technology is changing faster than most leaders can track? This is where a time-boxed experiment can help achieve clarity. You might focus your test on evaluating how generative AI makes just one workflow faster and more efficient. By the holidays, you can debrief, capture what worked and what didn’t, and walk into January with tangible evidence—not theory—about how AI can reshape the business.
For your Lock-In list, add one experiment this quarter that’s going to help you clarify your long-term strategy.
Culture: Feel the Future
Of course, you need to get your team to be future focused as well. Remember, only about 16% of people are psychologically wired to focus on the future. 70% of us are focused on the present, our eyes fixed on fighting today’s fires and hitting this quarter’s targets. Present-focused people often struggle to imagine a future they can’t see. They need to experience the future directly for it to feel real.
Fortunately, the future exists today—it’s just not very evenly distributed. In the next quarter, pick one time for your team to experience what the rest of the world might look like very soon. Instead of another dull executive retreat, find a way to expose your people to an aspect of the future that’s already taking shape. Visit a place where your category behaves differently, spend a day with a different kind of customer, or expose your team to an emerging technology.
Living in the Bay Area, I’ve gotten used to driverless cars plying the streets. Still, I get excited every time I climb into a Waymo with no one at the wheel. It gives me a glimpse into the future of transport, AI, and society. People who don’t live in the handful of cities where Waymo operates are always blown away when they visit and see robot cars picking up and dropping off riders without a hitch. You can talk about the pros and cons of driverless cars all day, but it’s only when you sit in a moving vehicle with an empty driver’s seat that you really get it on a visceral level. The same is true when you walk through a city where new forms of payment are being accepted, or when you watch people use your product in ways it wasn’t designed for. That’s the point.
For your Lock-In list, add one shared experience this quarter that helps your team to touch tomorrow.
Leadership: Reclaim Your Attention
And then there’s you.
As a leader, your insights, your energy, and your judgement are key competitive advantages, as much as any technological or market edge. Unfortunately, you live in a world of distraction and busywork that is constantly trying to steal your attention and undermine your strengths.
Your third Lock-In item should be about replenishing your ability to focus and lead with wisdom.
No grand gestures or transformations are required. Pick one thing, however small, that you’ll do from now through the end of December, and do it every day. Something that will make you a better leader. It could be as simple as getting eight hours of sleep. It could be a commitment to carve out a half hour every day for what Cal Newport calls “deep work”—time when you protect your attention and wrestle with complex problems. In the age of AI, the advantage will belong to leaders who are able to focus intensely in a distraction-free environment.
The best leaders recognize that building such practices into their lives is a duty, not a luxury. Bill Gates takes twice-yearly “think weeks” when he retreats to a cabin in the woods to read papers and books. Steve Jobs, the archetypal hard-driving leader, was a lifelong meditator. Billionaire investor Ray Dalio attributes his success to a twice-daily practice of transcendental meditation. Mark Zuckerberg finds time to train in jiu-jitsu. Airbnb’s Brian Chesky keeps a daily journal and works out twice a day.
For me, my leadership Lock-In challenge is to rebuild my reading muscles this quarter. I’ll admit it: I spend too much time on TikTok and too little time cracking open a book. And I’m supposed to be leading a company that creates big ideas. So, every night before I go to sleep, I’m reading one chapter of a book. Mind you, I’m not going deep into quantum theory or great philosophy. I’m just trying to build a habit again. That’s why I’m starting with the latest pulp thriller from Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code guy. My goal is to retrain my brain. Hopefully, it expands my capacity as a leader.
Flipping The Script
What the Great Lock In really offers is a way to bring strategy, culture, and leadership back to what they should be. In too many organizations, strategy has drifted into planning—endless debates over budgets and resource allocation. Culture has been reduced to beige offsites in hotel ballrooms, where PowerPoint replaces genuinely new, shared experiences. Leadership work often gets abstracted into occasional seminars, ignoring the need to build capacity every day.
The Lock In flips that script. For strategy, you’re running a live experiment instead of another round of planning. For culture, you’re giving your team a vivid experience of the future instead of another conference room. And for leadership, you’re committing to one habit that genuinely expands your capacity to make good decisions.
These aren’t theoretical exercises—they’re pragmatic, human, and time-bound. In 90 days, you can prove to yourself and your teams that strategy, culture, and leadership aren’t a checklist of tasks—they’re the foundation for meaningful change. For many of us, this year has been a bumpy ride, and we haven’t achieved everything we set out to do. This quarter, it’s time to lock in.
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