Merry Christmas. If you’re a sabb, you’re roughly halfway through. And something has probably shifted. Or maybe it needs to.
Back in July, everything was possibility. You had a manifesto, a mandate, ideas you’d been nurturing since you first thought about running.
You spent the summer meeting people, asking questions, poking at how things worked. You spotted problems your predecessors seemed to have missed.
You thought – why does nobody fix this?
Now it’s darker, colder, and the energy feels harder to summon. The things you wanted to change turn out to be tangled up with other things. Some of your ideas hit walls.
Others got overtaken by crises you didn’t anticipate. The year suddenly looks finite in a way it didn’t before.
I remember this feeling vividly from my own time as an officer in the late 90s. And I watched it happen to dozens of NUS officers I supported through the 2000s and 2010s – that strange gear-change somewhere around Christmas, when the expansive scanning of the first term gives way to something more urgent and constrained.
For a long time I thought of this as just the rhythm of the job – enthusiasm fading into exhaustion. But there’s something more interesting going on, and understanding it might help you make the second half of your year more productive than you expect.
The neverending brainstorm
New officers arrive in role ready to diverge. They’ve been elected to shake things up, spot what’s broken, challenge the inherited way of doing things. The SU sector reinforces this – we tell incoming officers to spend their first weeks listening, diagnosing, questioning. We celebrate the ones who identify problems nobody else saw.
This is cognitively and politically sensible. You don’t know the territory yet. You need to build relationships. And you have a mandate to show you’re not just going to be a caretaker. So you brainstorm, you consult, you float ideas, you keep options open.
You’re in what psychologists call divergent thinking mode – generating multiple possibilities rather than narrowing to a single answer.
You might be running a survey on a service, questioning why a funding process works the way it does, reviewing the SU’s relationship with the university, or sketching out a campaign on housing – all at once.
The problem is that divergent thinking, left to run indefinitely, is exhausting and eventually self-defeating. You can’t stay in permanent brainstorm. At some point you have to converge – pick priorities, commit resources, close down options, execute.
The listening tour has to end, the strategy has to crystallise, and the work has to get done. That means deciding the housing campaign is your priority and the activities funding review isn’t happening this year. It means stopping the consultation and starting the implementation.
What I saw, in myself and in officers I supported, was that the transition is harder than it looks. Some officers struggle to let go of the expansive early phase – they keep opening new fronts, keep questioning, keep adding to the list of things that need fixing.
I’ve seen officers still launching new assaults in February, still “gathering views” on issues they identified in September. Others swing too hard the other way, locking into a narrow agenda that stops responding to what they’re learning – they decided in August that their year was about mental health, and they’re still pushing the same plan even though the cost of living crisis has changed what students actually need.
Neither pattern ends well.
What the research says
There’s a whole body of academic work that describes the arc, though it uses slightly different language.
The most directly useful is Hambrick and Fukutomi’s “seasons of a CEO’s tenure” model, published in the Academy of Management Review in 1991. They tracked how leaders’ behaviour changes across their time in role and identified five phases: responding to a mandate, experimentation, selection of an enduring theme, convergence, and eventually dysfunction.
Early on, leaders are testing, scanning, trying things out. They’re responsive to signals from the environment because they haven’t yet committed to a particular way of seeing the job. Then they select a theme – a coherent strategy that makes sense of what they’ve learned – and shift into convergence, channelling attention and resources into reinforcing that approach.
For an SU officer, this might be the moment you decide “my year is about sorting out the relationship with student services” or “I’m going to focus on getting the SU’s democratic structures working properly.”
The risk, Hambrick and Fukutomi found, is that this convergence hardens into rigidity. The leader’s own mental framework narrows what they can see. Performance tends to follow an inverted U – improving in the exploratory early period, then declining as the framework ossifies. The officer who decided their year was about democracy stops noticing that students are struggling with something else entirely.
That all maps closely onto the language of “exploration” and “exploitation” from James March’s classic work on organisational learning. Exploration is search, experimentation, risk-taking – trying a new approach to Freshers’ Week, piloting a different way of running student council, testing whether students actually want a campaign on a particular issue.
Exploitation is refinement, implementation, efficiency – running Freshers’ Week the way you ran it last year because it worked, bedding in the advice service changes, delivering the housing campaign you’ve already designed.
March’s core argument is that both are essential but in tension. Over-exploration creates what he calls “failure traps” – lots of activity, insufficient follow-through, nothing ever consolidated. The SU version of this is the officer who leaves behind a dozen consultation reports and position papers, none of which turned into anything.
Over-exploitation creates “success traps” – organisations become ever more efficient at approaches that may no longer fit their environment. Think high election turnout over an officer structure that’s not fir-for-purpose.
The whole “organisational ambidexterity” literature then picks up this problem – how do leaders sustain the capacity to do both? (Ambidexterity just means being able to use both hands – the metaphor is about being equally capable in both modes.)
The answer, increasingly, is that it’s not about being a naturally “exploratory” or “exploitative” person. It’s about deliberately shifting between modes – what Rosing and colleagues call “opening behaviours” (encouraging experimentation, allowing errors, supporting independent thinking) and “closing behaviours” (monitoring goals, establishing routines, taking corrective action).
In SU terms – there’s a time to say “let’s see what students think about this, let’s try something different, let’s not assume the old way is right” – and a time to say “we’ve decided, now we need to deliver, let’s focus on making this work.” Effective leaders move between these modes as the work demands, rather than getting stuck in one.
For sabbs on a one-year cycle, this is reassuring and demanding in equal measure. Reassuring, because the gear-change you’re feeling is predictable and normal – it’s not a personal failing. Demanding, because it suggests you need to manage the transition deliberately rather than letting it happen to you.
The December pivot
If you’re still in full divergent mode in December – still generating new ideas, still opening new consultations, still treating everything as up for grabs – you probably need to start closing things down. Not because your ideas are bad, but because there isn’t time to do everything well. The second half of the year is when execution matters. Every priority you add dilutes the ones already on the list.
I’ve watched officers get to Easter with a beautifully comprehensive picture of everything that’s wrong and almost nothing actually changed. They ran out of runway – the diagnosis was excellent, but the treatment never happened.
Conversely, if you’ve already locked hard into a narrow agenda and stopped listening, you might have converged too early. The risk is that you’re optimising for the wrong things – delivering efficiently on a plan that no longer matches the situation. December is a reasonable moment to check whether your priorities still make sense, not to reopen everything, but to make sure you haven’t missed something important.
And then there’s the question of what you want to leave behind. Not in a grand “legacy” sense, but practically – what will still be in place in September 2026 that wasn’t there in July 2025? What will your successor inherit that’s genuinely better?
The research on exploration and exploitation is pointed. Pure exploration leaves nothing behind – you generated ideas, but they dissipated. Pure exploitation might embed the wrong thing. The goal is to have selected something – a policy, a process, a relationship, a way of working – that’s been tested and refined enough to survive the transition.
What does that look like in practice? It might be a new housing accreditation scheme that’s actually running, not just proposed. A changed committee structure that’s been through a full cycle. A memorandum of understanding with the university that your successor can build on. A staff role that didn’t exist before. These are the things that outlast you – not the ideas you had, but the changes you actually made and bedded in.
Earning the right to diverge
One piece of research speaks directly to a trap I’ve seen officers fall into. Edwin Hollander’s work on “idiosyncrasy credits” argues that a leader’s ability to deviate from group norms depends on a stock of credits accumulated by first conforming – demonstrating competence, showing respect for existing practice, visibly joining the team. Only once that stock is built up can a leader safely push for change without losing legitimacy.
For sabbs, that has a major implication. If you spent the first term only diverging – challenging everything, questioning everyone, positioning yourself as the outsider who sees what the insiders can’t – you may have burned through your credits without building any. Staff, trustees, and university staff will have noticed.
That looks like publicly criticising how things were done before you arrived, dismissing your predecessors’ work, treating staff as obstacles rather than colleagues, going to trustees with problems before you’ve tried to solve them with the CEO, telling the university everything the SU has been doing wrong.
Your ideas may be right, but they won’t land because of who they come from rather than what they are. You’ve spent credits you hadn’t yet earned.
Conversely, if you put in the relational work early – showed you could operate within the system, built trust, delivered on some smaller things – you’ve earned the right to push harder on the things that really matter. You chaired that committee competently. You dealt with the complaints that landed in your inbox. You showed up to the things you were supposed to show up to. You acknowledged what was working before you started talking about what wasn’t. December is when that investment starts to pay off.
Making the second half count
Based on watching a lot of officer years unfold, I think we end up with various ways to make Term 2 matter.
The first is to pick two or three things, maximum. Not two or three broad themes – two or three specific, achievable outcomes. Write them down. “Improve the student experience” is not a priority; “get the university to commit to a £500,000 hardship fund” is. “Work on housing” is not a priority; “launch an accreditation scheme with at least 20 landlords signed up by June” is. If you can’t articulate what “done” looks like, you haven’t converged enough.
The second is to stop starting. There are probably initiatives you kicked off in term one that aren’t going to get finished. The review of society funding. The consultation on democratic structures. The research project on student carers. Either hand them off properly or acknowledge they’re not happening this year. Zombie projects consume energy without producing results.
Front-loading the hard conversations should be a thing for January. If something requires a decision from trustees, or sign-off from the university, or a change to how staff work, the time to push for it is now – not May. Governance cycles are slow. If you need trustee approval in March, that means a paper in February, which means a draft in January, which means starting the conversation now. Leave enough runway for things to get stuck and unstuck.
Document as you go. One of the most useful things you can do for your successor is write down what you learned – including the things you tried that didn’t work and why. That’s not about claiming credit – it’s about making sure the organisation’s memory extends beyond your term.
Oh – and ask why. If you can see others succeeding or failing, or you can see why something is or isn’t working, the post-Xmas period gives you the scope to change the way you’re approaching things. That reflection, turned into hypothesis, then turned into plans, is literally what learning on the job looks like.
The point of the year
One-year terms are a structural challenge. They’re long enough to start things, short enough that finishing them requires real discipline. The divergent-then-convergent arc isn’t a failure of the model – it’s what has to happen if anything is going to stick.
Over the years, the officers I’ve seen have the most impact aren’t the ones with the most ideas or the biggest vision. They’re the ones who figured out, somewhere around now, what they were actually going to do – and then did it with enough focus and follow-through that it outlasted them.
You’ve got six months. That’s more time than it feels like. But only if you stop treating every week as another opportunity to explore, and start treating it as a chance to deliver.
