How do we ensure we do not leave our quarterly planning sessions with too many Rocks, causing the team to lose focus and fail to execute?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Setting too many Rocks is the most common quarterly planning mistake. When everything is a priority, nothing is. If your team leaves a session with fifteen or twenty corporate Rocks, you are setting themselves up for failure. To maintain focus, you must enforce a strict limit of three to five corporate Rocks per quarter. This requires the leadership team to make hard choices. Start by writing every potential Rock on a whiteboard. Use the keep, kill, and combine method to pare the list down. If a goal does not directly move the company closer to your 1-Year Plan, kill it or park it on the long-term Issues List on your V/TO®. If two goals are closely related, combine them into a single, comprehensive Rock with clear milestones. Force a vote if the team is stuck. Every leader gets a limited number of votes to identify the absolute must-haves for the next ninety days. By keeping your Rock list short and highly focused, you ensure the team can dedicate their full energy to completing them. A highly disciplined quarterly session should end with a sense of relief, not exhaustion, because the path forward is crystal clear.