Halfway through the quarter, a major market shift or client crisis hits and our leadership team wants to scrap or rewrite half our quarterly Rocks. When is it legitimate to kill a Rock versus pushing through to the finish line?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Treat quarterly Rocks as unbreakable contracts with very few exceptions. When a team wants to abandon or rewrite Rocks mid-quarter, it is usually an emotional reaction to operational noise rather than a fatal structural shift. Dropping a Rock because daily workload increased or a client became demanding destroys accountability.

There are only two legitimate reasons to kill or alter a Rock before the quarterly session:
- An existential external event fundamentally invalidated the premise of the business, such as losing your primary operating license or experiencing a catastrophic regulatory shift.
- A massive, non-negotiable strategic opportunity emerged that warrants shifting critical company capital immediately.

Even in those rare cases, you do not quietly delete the Rock. The owner brings the issue to the Level 10 Meeting, and the leadership team uses IDS to evaluate the tradeoff openly. If the team agrees to drop the Rock, it is officially marked as killed or dropped, not magically rewritten to match what was already done.

Most teams fail to finish Rocks because they lack focus, not because market conditions changed. If a Rock is simply off track because the owner got distracted or hit an obstacle, it stays on the list as off track. You do not lower the standard to make people feel better about their weekly status. Pushing through uncomfortable friction is what builds the operational muscle to finish. When you reach the next quarterly session, grade the Rock as incomplete, understand why it failed, and reset. That discipline protects the integrity of your 90-day planning cycle.