Plan a celebration for the last day of every cycle, and put it on the calendar during planning rather than deciding later. In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg breaks a habit into three steps: the trigger that causes the action, the action itself, and the reward that follows. You can reprogram a habit by identifying the trigger, changing the action, and facilitating a reward.
Most companies rolling out a new way of working build a trigger and an action and stop there. Then they wonder why it lasted two months.
The cycle is the action, the celebration is the reward
Six weeks of disciplined, scoped, planned work is the action. It is genuinely harder than the alternative, at least at first, because it asks people to decide things in advance instead of reacting.
Without something at the end, the only reward on offer is the absence of chaos, which is real but invisible. Nobody feels the crisis that did not happen.
The celebration makes it felt. It is the thing that turns "we got through the cycle" into "we finished Medellín," which is a different sentence.
How to actually run it
- Appoint one person during planning. Not at the end. During the planning window, while you are building the sheet.
- Give them a budget and time inside the cycle to organize it. If arranging it has to happen on their own time, it will not happen.
- Put it on the last Friday of week six. It should close the cycle, not float somewhere in the break.
- Rotate who plans it. Every cycle, a different person.
That last one matters more than it looks. My team went to Blackhawks games, escape rooms, and comedy shows, and the variety came entirely from rotating who chose. Everyone got a turn at picking something they actually liked, and nobody had to sit through the same team dinner six times a year.
Recognition is the smaller, more frequent version
Give recognition at the end of each week as well as each cycle.
People like being celebrated. I do not think that is a controversial position. We all appreciate being noticed for work we have done, and when you build a routine of celebrating individual accomplishments you give people something to look forward to that costs nothing.
The weekly version already has a home: the Friday check-out opens with everyone writing down what went well. That is recognition with a structure around it, which is why it works better than remembering to say well done.
There is a version of this I got badly wrong for years, and it is worth saying. I used to absorb extra work without telling anyone, and then feel unappreciated that nobody noticed. They could not notice. I never said anything. I needed to celebrate my own wins if I expected anyone else to.
If you do not have a team
Find a mastermind or a peer group to celebrate your wins with.
I originally wrote that line for people who had no superiors, and it turns out to matter more for people who have no colleagues at all. The reward step still has to exist, and being witnessed is most of what makes it work. Running cycles alone falls over at exactly this point, because there is nobody to notice that you finished.
The obvious objection
A celebration at the end of a cycle that went badly feels wrong. Do it anyway.
You are not rewarding the outcome, you are rewarding the practice. My first three cycles were a mess and we still needed to mark the end of them, because the thing being reinforced was showing up and planning again, which is the only behaviour that eventually produces a good cycle.
Cancel it when the work slips and you have taught the team that the reward was conditional, which is the same mistake as cancelling the two weeks off. Both times the lesson people learn is that it was never really theirs.
The whole method is in the guide to running your work in six-week cycles.