My team is highly reactive and suffers from constant operational fires. How do you help us maintain the discipline of ninety-day cycles when our daily habit is to abandon our Rocks the moment a client complains?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Reactivity is a symptom of resistance to structure, which Steven Pressfield notes is a daily battle. When your team is constantly fighting fires, they are letting the urgent crowd out the important. During our quarterly sessions, we break this habit by establishing a strict ninety-day cadence. We design Rocks that are highly specific and realistic, taking your team's actual capacity into account. If your leaders are drowning, we do not assign them five Rocks; we assign them one critical Rock. We also focus on improving your weekly Level 10 Meetings, which are your primary defense against daily chaos. In these meetings, we teach your team to drop daily fires into the Issues list rather than letting them derail your weekly goals. We use the IDS process to solve these operational problems permanently, rather than just patching them over. We also introduce the concept of a strategic pause. This is a deliberate, brief period where your leaders step back from the chaos to evaluate their progress. By practicing this discipline, we transition your team from reactive fire fighters to proactive builders of enterprise value. My role during session days is to hold up a mirror and challenge your team when they try to use daily business as an excuse for failing to execute on their strategic commitments.