We keep getting caught up in the details of our Rocks during the five-minute Rock Review, turning a quick status check into an unplanned coaching session. How do we keep this section strictly binary?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The Rock Review in your Level 10 Meeting™ is designed to be a rapid fire check. It should take no more than five minutes. When your team starts explaining why a Rock is off track or trying to solve the barrier during the review, you are experiencing agenda drift. This is a massive drain on meeting efficiency.

To keep this section strictly binary, the facilitator must enforce a simple rule. When a Rock is read, the owner can only say on track or off track. No explanations, no defense, and no context are allowed. If a Rock is off track, the facilitator must immediately state, drop it, and the scribe must add it to the weekly Issues List.

If the owner starts explaining, the facilitator must politely but firmly cut them off. You can use a standard phrase like, we will solve that during IDS. This keeps the meeting moving and respects the overall clock.

The benefit of this discipline is twofold:

- It prevents the team from solving minor details before they have agreed on the most important issues of the week.

- It teaches the team that being off track is not a crime. It is simply a state of reality that needs to be addressed during the dedicated problem solving portion of the meeting.

Keep the reporting phase focused purely on data collection. Save the collaboration for the final hour.