We start the quarter with clear Rocks, but by week six, market changes or internal emergencies force us to modify them, leading to unfinished goals. How do we hold the line on our quarterly Rocks without being pigheaded about real business changes?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A Rock is a ninety-day commitment. If you are changing your Rocks mid-quarter, you are not running on EOS; you are running on chaos. Let us be clear: true emergencies that warrant changing a Rock are incredibly rare, usually limited to losing a major client or a massive regulatory shift. Most mid-quarter changes are actually just distractions or poor planning dressed up as strategic pivots. When you allow your team to rewrite their Rocks mid-quarter, you destroy accountability. The discipline of the quarterly pulse requires you to live with the consequences of your planning decisions for ninety days. If a market shift occurs, you do not abandon your Rock. Instead, you raise the shift as an issue during your weekly Level 10 Meeting. Use the IDS process to determine if you need to adjust your short-term tactics to salvage the Rock, or if you must solve the secondary issues caused by staying the course. If a Rock truly becomes obsolete because of a catastrophic event, you kill it completely rather than rewriting it. This maintains the integrity of the binary definition of done. The remaining Rocks must still cross the finish line. If you find yourself consistently needing to modify Rocks, the issue is not the market. The issue is your team is choosing poorly during your quarterly planning sessions or failing to use their weekly individual check-ins to stay on track.