Ask a leadership team what their strategy is, and most of them will describe a set of initiatives. Ask them what problem those initiatives solve, and the room goes quiet. This lesson establishes why the first week of the sprint is assessment and only assessment. No initiatives, no solutions, no. Here is what we should do. The reason is simple. Every organization has a stock of preloaded answers. The pet project, the acquisition somebody has been pushing for two years, the reorg. If you start with answers, the assessment becomes a search for supporting evidence. That is not analysis. That is justification. What a situation assessment actually covers. Why divergent thinking comes before convergent thinking. And how to run this week without letting your team collapse into solution mode. One, state the rule out loud to your team. This week we describe reality. We do not fix it. 2. Set up a parking lot. Every time someone proposes an initiative, it goes on the list. And the conversation moves on. Those ideas are not wasted. They become your candidate initiatives in Week 2. You are sequencing, not silencing. 3. Understand the four assessments coming this week. Performance and Current Strategy Review. Internal Assessment using VRIO and your core competencies and strategic assets. external and environmental assessment using PestPlus Competitive and Cyber. Then convergence, the so what. Four, assign a lead for each assessment. One person prepares, the group reviews. Do not do all four as a committee. Five, set the standard for evidence. Every observation gets a source. Everybody knows is not a source. Open the Situation Assessment Workbook. It has a tab for each of the four assessments and a parking lot tab. Set it up today and give your four leads access. What's next? SMP1L2. Performance and Current Strategy Review. You start with the hardest mirror. What your own numbers say about the strategy you have been running.