When a quarterly Rock hits a wall in week six because a foundational assumption made during planning was wrong, should we kill it, pivot it, or push through?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Do not push through a broken premise simply to maintain the appearance of execution. Grinding toward a meaningless outcome wastes company capital and burns out your team. At the same time, you cannot allow leaders to casually rewrite Rocks mid-quarter because execution became difficult.

When a Rock owner realizes a core assumption is invalid, they must immediately drop it to the weekly Issues List in the Level 10 Meeting. The leadership team uses IDS to evaluate the situation objectively.

You have two acceptable paths:
- Kill the Rock: If the market reality, vendor failure, or technical roadblock makes the original outcome irrelevant or impossible, officially mark the Rock as dropped. Document why the assumption failed, capture lessons learned, and reassign the owner capacity to other immediate priorities.
- Keep the Rock and adjust milestones: If the end outcome remains critical to the 1-Year Plan, the team can agree to redefine the intermediate steps, but the ultimate definition of done does not change to make it easier.

Never quietly rewrite the Rock in week seven to guarantee a green checkmark at quarter-end. That creates artificial success and destroys organizational accountability. If an assumption failed, own the dropped Rock, accept the red status on the quarterly completion rate, and bring the root cause into your next quarterly planning session so your scoping improves.