What is your policy if our executive team tries to reschedule a quarterly session because an urgent customer fire or operational crisis lands on our calendar?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

My policy is straightforward: session dates are inviolable and must not be rescheduled for customer emergencies, operational fires, or heavy workloads. The only acceptable reasons to move a session are acute personal illness or family bereavement.

When a leadership team requests to reschedule a quarterly session because of a business fire, it is almost always proof that the company is trapped in the very firefighting cycle EOS is designed to break. Rescheduling a full-day session because a customer is angry or an operational crisis hit signals that your business runs your leadership team, rather than your leadership team running your business.

If you allow day-to-day crises to derail your strategic calendar, you set a precedent that strategic discipline is optional. The moment things become uncomfortable, accountability gets pushed off, Rocks stall, and the 90-day pulse is broken.

When a crisis hits on the week of a session, you attend the session anyway. If the operational crisis is genuinely severe, we bring it straight into the room at 8:30 AM, place it at the top of the Issues List, and spend the morning using IDS to solve the root cause permanently. You do not run away from the session to fight the fire; you use the session to put the fire out for good.