Don’t Wait for October.

Four boxes of our kit went out the door last week. One client, four countries, all landing before 1 October so their people can run the room on day one. I was on site with another client on Tuesday. None of that got organised in September… and back in July I wrote an edition saying so. Start early, because the good version takes time to build and the posters don’t.

Right. So if you’re reading this and you HAVEN’T started, that edition is no use to you now. October starts on Thursday.

You know what normally happens at this point. Last year’s posters get found. The module gets re-assigned. A phishing test goes out in week one and catches the same people it caught last year. And that’s October… a padlock in the lift and a completion rate.

I’ve said this before, but Owen Sutton said it better than me on the podcast last week: the old rule was get in front of people 7 times, and he reckons it’s nearer 70 now. One email and one module doesn’t even get you to 7.

So do the opposite. Do something tiny, every single day.

We’ve built a 31-day calendar for this. Not 31 facts. 31 things your people actually DO… 2 minutes each, no kit, no budget, nobody’s permission needed. Day 1 is Thursday. Print it, or drop it into Teams as one message a day. It’s free, there’s no form, and it’s here. If you do nothing else this week, do that.

Then, once Thursday’s sorted, have a look at the real problem.

For most companies, October IS the plan. It gets a theme, a budget and a bit of attention, and the other 11 months get a policy link in the induction pack. And I mean, we know behaviour doesn’t work like that, right? People change what they do when they’ve experienced something, when the people around them have been through it too, and when it happens often enough that the right response stops being a decision. That’s the design principle under everything we build, from the escape rooms to the digital platforms.

Which is why the planner on the same page doesn’t care what month it is. It makes you write down the behaviours you’re actually trying to change BEFORE you pick an activity, then hangs the activities, the comms and the measures off that. Start it on 1 October. Start it on 1 November. It doesn’t matter.

So print the calendar today and get day 1 on desks Thursday morning. Then open the planner and write down the one behaviour you want to be different by Christmas. That’s your October.