The Debrief Discipline
The week you stop reacting to peak and start learning from it.
Peak is starting to ease off. Orders are still coming in, but the panic has gone. Your team is tired. Dashboards are flatter. Slack feels quieter.
This is the point where most teams drop their shoulders and move on. It’s also the moment where the best teams do something different: they sit down, together, and make sense of what just happened.
Not in February. Not “when things are less hectic”. Now – while the friction, the wins, and the near-misses are still fresh.
Week 5 of The Calm Advantage is about that discipline: treating the debrief as part of delivery, not a nice-to-have you’ll get to one day.
Previously in the series
If you’ve been following along, you’ve already built the raw material for a powerful debrief:
Week 1 – The Live Stress Test Begins – you treated peak as a live diagnostic and started a shared peak log.
Week 2 – Friction Reveals Truth – you named internal friction in design, process, system, and leadership, using the five friction points.
Week 3 – Your Customers Are Teaching You – you turned behaviour and emotion into a Customer Signal Log.
Week 4 – The Hidden Cost of Heroics & The Slack Channel That Says It All – you added Team & Culture: heroics, tone, fatigue, and what Slack revealed about how it felt to work your peak.
Week 5 is where all of that comes into the room.
Why you can’t wait to “do this later”
If you leave the debrief until after Christmas, three things happen:
The sharp edges blur – people forget the details that actually matter.
The story gets rewritten – by instinct, ego, or whoever shouts loudest.
The log you’ve been building becomes a file, not a decision tool.
Peak is your most honest performance review. You’ve seen how your people, platforms, and partners behave when the pressure is real.
A disciplined debrief says: “We’re not going to waste that.”
Perfection is the goal, not the finish line. You’re not chasing some fantasy version of flawless peak. You’re aiming for a clean 9/10 that makes next year easier, less frantic, and more profitable than this one.
Bring the whole log into the room
The worst debriefs start from scratch: a blank agenda, vague memories, a few anecdotes from whoever has the most seniority.
You’ve already done the hard part. Your peak log should now hold:
Operational stress points and surprises (Week 1)
Internal friction across design, process, system, and leadership (Week 2)
Customer behaviour and emotional signals (Week 3)
Team & Culture – heroics, tone, morale (Week 4)
That’s the agenda.
Instead of “What went well? What didn’t?”, you can ask:
Which issues showed up in more than one lens – ops, customer, culture?
Where did friction for the team and friction for the customer overlap?
Which problems were one-off, and which ones feel like déjà vu?
This is where you stop treating problems as isolated incidents and start seeing the pattern underneath.
The three-column debrief that actually fits on a page
You don’t need a giant slide deck or a three-hour workshop. You need one clear framework everyone can follow.
Across each theme that matters to you – trading, marketing, CX, fulfilment, dev, support, leadership – run a simple three-column grid:
What broke or strained – Describe the issue, not the drama. “Stock feed lagged by 45 minutes at 7pm Friday” is far more useful than “Stock was a nightmare”.
Why – Go one step past the obvious. Was it design, process, system, or leadership?
How we fix it for next time – One clear action, one clear owner, one clear deadline. That might be a test, a new rule, a process tweak, a platform change, or a conversation that should have happened months ago.
If you find yourself adding a fourth or fifth column, you’re probably overcomplicating it. The discipline is in keeping it tight.
Make it cross-functional and safe
A debrief with only senior leaders will miss most of the truth.
Your frontline teams know where the bodies are buried:
Support saw every confused customer and repeated question.
Ops felt every wobble in fulfilment.
Dev and data teams saw where the systems buckled.
Trading and marketing watched which bets landed and which flopped.
Invite them in. Set expectations clearly:
This is not a blame session.
We’re looking for patterns, not perfect recall.
We’re here to make next year less stressful for everyone.
A simple way to make this inclusive: start with one round where everyone has to name something from their own area that could have gone better. No-one is allowed to only talk about other teams. It normalises that every function has work to do and puts improvement ahead of finger-pointing.
Then use your friction lenses:
Ask support which questions kept coming back.
Ask CX which behaviour patterns lined up with frustration or anxiety.
Ask dev where they saw heroics, bypasses, or manual fixes.
Ask leadership where expectations, ownership, or decisions were unclear.
The magic happens when someone says, “I thought it was just me,” and three others nod.
Using C.A.L.M. – now with Measure
Earlier in the series, you’ve used C.A.L.M. in motion:
Capture – the live peak log.
Analyse – naming friction and connecting it to design, process, system, leadership.
Learn – understanding what it meant for customers and for your team.
Now we’re ready to add our missing piece: Measure.
You don’t need perfect models. You do need to size things enough to make decisions. For each potential fix, ask:
Impact – if we fix this, what changes for revenue, cost, risk, or morale?
Effort – how hard is it in time, money, and emotional load?
Confidence – how sure are we that this is the right fix?
Signal – what would we look at to know it’s working?
Back in Week 2 we talked about treating friction as useful – problems as pointers to progress, not just irritations. Use that same mindset here. For each row in your backlog, write one simple line: “Good would look like…”
“Good would look like customers getting their dispatch confirmation within 5 minutes, even at peak.”
“Good would look like support seeing 30% fewer ‘where is my order?’ tickets.”
“Good would look like stock updates staying in sync across all channels during the 7–9pm spike.”
That way, Measure is anchored to outcomes, not activity. You’re not just fixing pain; you’re defining the opportunity on the other side.
This gives you a simple way to rank what’s on the table. Some items become “fix now”. Some become “plan and fund properly”. Some become “decide to live with it, but on purpose”.
That’s what a calm roadmap looks like.
From notes to a Q1 action set
By the end of the debrief, you should not have:
A long list of everything that ever went wrong.
A vague sense of “we should really do better next year”.
You should have:
Three to five clear priorities for Q1.
Named owners for each.
A simple description of what better looks like.
A short note on how you’ll measure progress.
If you want to go further, group them:
Stability – things that make peak less fragile next time.
Experience – things that make it feel better for customers and staff.
Growth – things that unlock revenue you’re currently leaving on the table.
Now your peak log has done its job. It’s not a diary. It’s a decision engine.
This week’s job
In the next seven days:
Book a one-hour cross-functional debrief (before everyone disappears).
Bring the full peak log to the table – ops, friction, customer, culture.
Use the three-column framework across your key themes.
Apply C.A.L.M. with Measure to sort noise from impact, and write “good would look like…” for each priority.
Leave the room with three to five Q1 priorities, each with an owner.
Peak isn’t over when the orders slow down. It’s over when the learning stops.
Next week – From observation to clarity
Next week, in Week 6 – From Observation to Clarity, we’ll zoom out.
You’ll take the outcomes from this debrief and turn them into a story you can share upwards and sideways – with senior stakeholders, partners, and the wider team. Three priorities, three owners, one plan.
The calm advantage is not about doing more. It’s about knowing, and showing, what matters now.
JH – The Breakthrough Agency
When strategy, execution and platforms drift apart, peak exposes it fast. JH sits alongside ecommerce leaders as a thinking and doing partner – joining up what happened in your systems, what customers felt and how your team carried the load, then shaping it into three to five priorities with clear owners. For Adobe Commerce and Magento brands that want fewer post-peak surprises and more deliberate progress, that’s our lane.