Our leadership team agrees on quarterly Rocks during our session, but by week seven or eight, projects stall because departments run into cross-functional roadblocks that nobody planned for. How do we keep Rocks moving when multiple seats are involved?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A Rock stalls out in the second half of a quarter when ownership gets muddy across seats. In the EOS framework, only one human being can own a Rock. There are no shared Rocks, committee Rocks, or co-owned initiatives. When a Rock requires work from another department, that requirement must be explicitly scoped, agreed to, and scheduled during your quarterly session, not dumped on someone mid-quarter.

If the head of sales sets a Rock to launch a new CRM pipeline, but execution relies on marketing to write email templates and operations to configure integrations, those dependencies are not assumptions. They must be validated before you leave the session room. The supporting leaders must confirm they have the capacity in their own seats to deliver their portion without compromising their existing Rocks.

During weekly Level 10 meetings, track Rocks with strict binary discipline: on track or off track. The moment a cross-functional dependency hiccups in week four or five, the owner must immediately call it off track and drop it down to the Issues List. Do not wait until week nine to announce that operations never delivered their piece. You use IDS to bring both seats to the table, identify where the bottleneck sits, solve the resource conflict, and establish clean next steps with clear to-do items for the coming week.

If an owner allows a Rock to sit off track for multiple consecutive weeks without pushing it into IDS, that is an accountability failure. A leadership team that finishes Rocks treats roadblocks as immediate tactical issues to resolve, not convenient excuses at the end of the ninety-day cycle.