Rest Days Are Part of Training

Leadership during ERP implementation | Learning cycles, retrospectives, psychological safety

There is a particular kind of discipline the gym teaches that many leaders overlook. It is not the discipline of lifting heavier, pushing harder, or adding one more set. It is the discipline of knowing when not to push. The discipline of recovery. The discipline of pausing. The discipline of rest.

Progress in training does not happen only when the weight is moving. It happens after the workout — when the body repairs, adapts, and returns stronger. Without recovery, training becomes strain. Strain becomes fatigue. Fatigue becomes injury.

ERP implementations are no different. However, many leaders manage these projects as if constant pressure is the only way to succeed. They push for more reviews, escalate issues, emphasize urgency, work late, and demand rapid progress. But intensity does not equal progress. Moving quickly does not mean successful adoption. And exhaustion doesn’t prove true commitment.

The best implementations understand something more fundamental. Rest days are part of training.

The Hidden Fatigue Inside ERP Projects

An ERP implementation asks people to do two jobs at once.

They must run today’s business while helping to build tomorrow’s operating model. They must meet customer deadlines while attending workshops, validating masters, testing transactions, learning new screens, and adapting to new controls.

On the project plan, these are tasks. Within the organisation, there are loads.

A finance executive is reconciling old habits with new approval workflows.
A production planner is concerned that data accuracy will disrupt scheduling.
A sales user is anxious about capturing every lead and follow-up in the CRM.
A warehouse supervisor fears dispatch delays after go-live.

This is why some projects look healthy in meetings but feel heavy on the ground. The dashboard may be green even as people run out of energy.

In the gym, that is the athlete smiling through overtraining. The numbers may still look fine — right up until the breakdown begins.

Go-Live Is Not the Finish Line

One of the most common leadership mistakes is treating go-live as the final rep.

The system launches. Emails are sent. Photos are taken. Leadership congratulates the team. Attention then shifts to the next priority.

But anyone who has lived through an ERP implementation knows the real work often begins after go-live.

That is when users face live pressure.
That is when process gaps become visible.
That is when confidence is tested.
That is when small frustrations can turn into resistance.

In gym terms, go-live is not racking the weight and walking away. It is the moment you ask: was the lift strong, or did we compromise form to finish it?

Retrospectives: Checking Form After the Lift

Strong leaders create pauses during implementation, not because the project is failing, but because learning requires space.

A retrospective is the organisational equivalent of checking the form after a lift. You do it not because something went wrong, but because improvement requires feedback.

After blueprint sign-off.
After UAT.
After training waves.
After the mock migration.
After the first month’s close on the new system.

The questions are simple and powerful:

• What worked well?
• Where did users struggle?
• What surprised us?
• Which assumptions were wrong?
• What must we improve before the next phase?

Without these pauses, teams repeat friction until it becomes the norm.

Psychological Safety Is Recovery for the Mind

Physical recovery repairs muscles. Psychological safety repairs trust. 

Every ERP project depends on people speaking honestly and early. Yet many stay silent.

They do not admit to confusion.
They hide adoption problems.
They understate risks.
They say “all good” when they mean “we are stuck.”

Why? Because honesty can feel unsafe. Psychological safety is not softness. It is a form of implementation intelligence. When people feel safe, they say:

• “Training was not enough.”
• “This workflow is slowing us down.”
• “Master data needs cleanup.”
• “Users need support on the shop floor.”
• “We made the wrong design choice.”

That honesty saves projects. Silence delays failure until it becomes costly. In the gym, ignored pain becomes injury. In ERP, ignored truth becomes rework.

Great Implementations Use Cycles

The best training programmes do not require maximum effort every day. They work in cycles: push, recover, adapt, repeat.

ERP leadership should do the same.

There are phases for design intensity.
Phases for testing discipline.
Phases for hypercare support.
Phases for stabilisation.
Phases for optimisation.

If every phase is treated like an emergency, people burn out and judgment declines.

Sometimes the best leadership move is not another escalation meeting. It is a day of focused user support.
Sometimes the fastest decision is not more pressure. It is less confusion.
Sometimes the smartest way to move forward is to pause and restore confidence.

What Leaders Should Do Now

§  Build recovery into the plan- Stabilisation is not optional. Schedule it.

§  Run retrospectives at every milestone - Capture lessons while they are fresh.

§  Measure energy, not just status - A green tracker can hide a tired workforce.

§  Reward early truth - Thank the person who raises a problem early.

§  Stay visible after go-live - Leadership presence matters most when confidence dips.

Final Lift

Any leader can ask for one more sprint. Mature leaders know how to sustain performance.

ERP implementation is not won by endlessly pushing people. It is won by helping people learn, adapt, recover, and grow stronger through change.

Because in the gym, and in transformation, recovery is not the opposite of progress.

It is where progress becomes tangible.

 

Anna, Bella, and the First Lesson in Loss

I may sound like a broken record when I keep bringing everything back to education, but it is hard not to, because it quietly influences how we experience almost everything else in life. Today, the trigger was a short write-up by a friend who started with a simple question: Why does “we need to talk” feel like a threat to our entire existence? Because, in some ways, it is.

We are never truly taught that there is a “need to talk”—not just with others, but, more crucially, with ourselves. We are not guided on how to sit with our feelings, how to name them, or how to make sense of them. So, when we hear the words “we need to talk,” it signifies something entirely different. It feels like escalation. Like a situation that demands “all arms.” Like something is about to break, and we are already unprepared. Not because the conversation is hard, but because we have never learned how to have it.

And perhaps that is the deeper loss we bear—the loss of the ability to converse with ourselves. The inability to pause, to grant ourselves space, to understand what is happening within us before we are asked to respond to the world outside. When that inner dialogue is absent, every external conversation begins to feel like a confrontation. And perhaps that is one of our earliest and most invisible experiences of grief—not something we recognise, but something we live with.

I am reminded of my niece at ten, who asked for two goldfish—Anna and Bella. She fed them every day, made sure the bowl was clean, and watched them with a kind of care that only children seem to possess. One morning, we woke up to find both fish dead. She was still asleep, and the adults in the house were left with a question we were not quite prepared for—how do we tell her? It did not go down well. There was shock, then silence, and then inconsolable crying. And then, something else. She insisted we bury them in a pot in the garden. Looking back, that may have been her first real encounter with grief, and instinctively, she knew what to do—she gave it a ritual, a space, a meaning.

Because grief is not just sadness. It is the moment reality refuses to match what we expected. It is the collapse of something that felt certain—a presence, a pattern, a possibility. It is not only about losing someone; it is about losing what that someone meant, what they held together, what they quietly made possible. Grief feels like powerlessness. It asks us to sit with something we cannot fix, reverse, or control. And that is precisely why we either rush to escape it—or stay trapped in it, long after the moment has passed.

Her next encounter occurred later, when her mother was admitted to hospital for surgery. She was usually fine when her mother travelled, but this time was different. Travel was temporary and predictable, but a hospital brought uncertainty. That was more difficult to accept. It makes one wonder what we truly believe grief to be. Is it solely about death, or is it also about the disruption of what feels stable and anticipated?

For much of her early years, she was in a Montessori environment where learning was conceptual, exploratory, and self-paced. She was not constantly compared to others, nor pushed into structured competition. It makes me wonder whether the question is not whether children experience pressure or failure, but whether they are helped to understand and process what those experiences mean.

We spend a lot of time debating educational systems—traditional, Montessori, Waldorf—each with its own philosophy of learning. But there is a quieter question we rarely ask: what is the child’s relationship with learning?

That relationship is where some of the earliest, most unseen forms of grief start. When a child feels they are not good at something, that it is not for them, or that they are not noticed, something shifts. Not dramatically or visibly, but something disconnects. If that moment is not recognised or named, it does not go away. It quietly settles and begins to influence how the child appears later—through disinterest, avoidance, withdrawal, or sometimes overwhelming emotional reactions.

Grief is not just about loss; it also involves the difficulty of making sense of change, accepting success without fear, and enduring failure without falling apart. Yet, we do not teach this. We instruct children on how to perform, but rarely on how to connect—their experiences, their feelings, and what it all means for them.

That, perhaps, is the missing conversation.

Because when a child can say that something is hard, that something matters, or that something does not feel like them, they are not just becoming better learners. They are learning how to stay connected to themselves.

I find myself thinking about what I want for my girls. Not a life without difficult conversations, but the ability to approach them differently. To move from hearing “we need to talk” with anxiety, to saying “let’s talk” with calm and confidence. To be part of an environment that allows them to sit with ambiguity, to work through what they feel, and to trust the voices within them—without fear of being dismissed, silenced, or burned for it, like Joan of Arc.

Because perhaps the true purpose of education is not merely to prepare children for the world, but to ensure they do not lose themselves in the process.

 

Leadership Under Load — Ego Lifts Get You Injured

Every gym has one.

The person who loads more weight than they can actually lift. A quick glance around, a slightly louder-than-necessary grunt, plates added to the bar with quiet theatre. The bar comes up halfway, the back bends, and someone rushes in to help.

In the gym I call this an ego lift — lifting to be seen, not to be strong.
In organisations, the same instinct shows up as well-intentioned leadership optimism.

In many ERP implementations — especially SAP Business One rollouts — a familiar moment appears early. A senior leader, often well-meaning and energetic, announces a timeline.

“We will go live in 90 days.”
“This will solve our reporting issues.”
“After this, decisions will be data-driven.”

The room becomes silent. Not because everyone agrees, but because nobody wants to be the person who says it cannot be done. The leader is not lifting a barbell. The leader is lifting expectations. And expectations are heavier than steel.

Ego lifts rarely come from arrogance. They come from pressure. Boards want speed. Customers want reliability. Teams want clarity. Investors want certainty. Leadership fills uncertainty with confidence.

But confidence is not capacity.

ERP implementation is not a motivational project. It is a structural one. Master data must be cleaned. Processes must be redesigned. Roles must become clear. Users must learn new behaviour. Old habits must fade slowly. Hero cultures skip this phase and go straight to the heavy weight.

What follows is predictable. Timelines shrink artificially. Training is rushed. Testing becomes symbolic. Exceptions multiply. Workarounds begin. The organisation technically goes live. Operationally, it does not.

Excel stays “just for safety.”
Approvals continue on WhatsApp.
Reports are distrusted.
Finance reconciles manually.

From the outside the lift looks successful. Inside the muscle, a tear has already begun.

This is the most dangerous ERP failure — not collapse, but partial adoption. The system exists, but behaviour does not change.

In the gym, ego lifting injures the back. In organisations, it injures trust.

After one strained implementation, employees stop believing timelines, managers stop committing to change, IT stops getting cooperation, and leadership stops receiving honest feedback. The next project becomes harder before it even begins. People do not resist technology. They resist pain they have experienced before.

I should admit this — I have done ego lifts too. Not dramatic ones. The polite corporate version. And occasionally, the literal gym version.

There are days when you feel unusually energetic. You slept well. The music is right. You want to progress faster than your body has negotiated for. So you say to the trainer, “Let’s increase the weight today.” Sometimes you don’t say it directly. You just repeat, “I think I can.”

My trainer does not argue. He just gives a look.

It is a calm, very firm no — the kind you immediately understand is not about authority. It is about consequence. A good trainer is not managing today’s lift. He is protecting tomorrow’s workout. Some days your muscles are strong but your stabilisers are tired. Some days your enthusiasm is ready but your joints are not. You do not always have the data to judge your own capacity.

Leadership works exactly like that.

Many times in ERP projects, leaders — including me — push timelines not out of ego, but optimism. We see benefits early and want momentum. We want progress to feel real. But organisations also have stabilisers: users learning new screens, finance closing cycles differently, managers trusting system reports, teams unlearning parallel processes.

When we push the organisation to lift more than its readiness, the system does not collapse immediately. It compensates. People work late. Excel returns quietly. Manual approvals restart. The project looks successful until months later adoption falls.

That is when you realise what the trainer already knew.

Capacity is not decided by motivation. It is decided by repeatability.

The strongest lifters in the gym are not the loudest. They warm up, start light, repeat movements correctly, and add weight slowly. They are not trying to impress the room. They are trying to survive repetition.

Good ERP leadership looks the same. Strong leaders say: we stabilise master data first, we pilot before scaling, finance closes one full cycle in the system before go-live, adoption matters more than date. It sounds cautious. It is actually courageous. The hardest leadership act is not making a promise. It is setting a boundary.

Hero culture says a strong leader solves problems personally. System culture says a strong leader builds a system where problems reduce over time.

ERP implementations succeed when leadership stops trying to be the strongest individual in the room and becomes the protector of process discipline. The goal is not a dramatic go-live. The goal is a boring month-end close.

If your ERP implementation feels exciting on launch day, be careful. In the gym, excitement during the lift usually means the weight is wrong. Organisations rarely fail on the day of the ego lift. They fail slowly — through workaround, fatigue, and quiet disengagement.

Strong leadership does not lift the heaviest weight.

It lifts the weight the organisation can repeat tomorrow. 

And sometimes the most responsible leadership decision is simply this: Not yet. We build strength first.

Leadership Under Load — Episode 3 The Warm-Up Is Not Optional

The warm-up is that part of the workout where your body negotiates with you to go back home.

It begins almost immediately. The intention is sincere, the schedule has been blocked, you have worn the right shoes, carried the water bottle, and declared to yourself that today you will be disciplined — and within five minutes your hamstrings file objections, your shoulders remember old grievances, and your knees suddenly develop a philosophical opposition to effort. Nothing heavy has started yet. No serious work has begun. And still, this is when resistance is at its peak.

Not during the lift. Before it.

My trainer has this habit of telling me stuff that I just don’t like, especially at that specific moment when he is — the warm-up isn’t conditioning your muscles, it’s testing your commitment. Your body is quietly asking whether you truly intend to do what you confidently declared at the entrance. And some days I strongly dislike my trainer. It’s a very particular irritation reserved for the person who is absolutely right, sees what you are avoiding, refuses to indulge your explanations — and is also the person you are literally paying to make you uncomfortable.

And this is exactly what the client begins to feel about us when we start Business Process Mapping.

The project has already had a confident beginning. Leadership has attended the kick-off. Timelines have been discussed. Everyone agrees the organisation needs structure. The vendor presentation was clear. There is relief that “a system” is finally coming. Then the first real working session happens.

Business Process Mapping.

And suddenly enthusiasm develops a calendar conflict.

“Do we need all departments present?”
“Can we shorten these workshops?”
“Can you just configure the system and show us?”
“Users will learn once they see the screens.”
“We will clean up processes after go-live.”

This is not resistance to software. This is the organisation negotiating to go back home.

Because BPM is the moment the project stops being about technology and starts being about behaviour.

During BPM sessions no one is learning SAP, or any ERP for that matter. Instead something far more uncomfortable happens. Sales realises delivery commitments are made without checking capacity. Production explains plans change depending on who escalates the loudest. Finance quietly admits reports are manually corrected before management sees them. Operations discovers three different departments maintain the same master data in three different spreadsheets and each one believes theirs is the correct version. Leadership notices decisions depend on individuals, not processes.

This is why BPM feels exhausting. It is not documentation. It is organisational self-awareness.

In the gym the warm-up exposes stiffness you didn’t know you had. In organisations BPM exposes dependencies you didn’t know you relied on. And in both places the instinct is identical — skip it and get to the “real work.”

Companies often want training quickly. “Let users see the screens, they will understand.” But training without process clarity creates a predictable outcome. Users learn transactions but not flow. Approvals continue on calls. Updates continue on WhatsApp. Spreadsheets quietly survive in the background. Data is entered at the end of the month just before review meetings. And then leadership concludes the software is good but adoption is poor.

Adoption is not poor. Preparation was skipped.

We assume change management begins after the system arrives. It does not. Change management begins when people participate in deciding how work will happen. A warehouse supervisor who helps design the goods receipt process rarely resists the system later, because the system is no longer management’s imposition — it is his workflow. People do not resist change as much as they resist loss of control.

A kick-off meeting therefore is not the beginning of implementation. It is the beginning of alignment. If the first question after kick-off is “when is go-live,” the project is already in danger. The more important question is quieter — “how do we actually work right now, truthfully?”

ERP systems rarely fail because the software cannot handle complexity. They fail because organisations try to automate assumptions. BPM is where those assumptions surface. And just like a warm-up, it feels unnecessary only until the consequences of skipping it arrive.

In the gym, the warm-up feels like delay. In reality, it is what allows you to train tomorrow.

In organisations, BPM feels like lost time. In reality, it is what allows the system to survive go-live.

The strongest lifters respect the warm-up the most. The most successful implementations respect the beginning the most.

Because speed without preparation is not efficiency.

It is damage… simply scheduled in advance.