Why Some Leadership Teams Set Rocks in 45 Minutes (and Others Take Three Hours)
I ran two Quarterlies with two different leadership teams this week.
One set their Rocks in 45 minutes. The other took almost three hours.
Same framework. Same tools. Same number of leaders at the table. The gap wasn't talent, and it wasn't effort — the three-hour team worked just as hard as the fast one. The difference was entirely about what happened before either team walked into the room.
I want to break down why, because it comes down to a sequencing decision inside the Quarterly that most people never think to question: why Rocks get set before IDS opens.
The Sequence Isn't an Accident
If you've sat through a Quarterly session, you know the agenda has a shape. Review the prior quarter's Rocks — not just whether they got done, but the execution behind them. Review the V/TO, which includes checking progress against the 1-Year Plan: are we on track to hit those goals, or not. Learn an EOS tool, so the team keeps sharpening the discipline behind the framework. Set new Rocks for the next 90 days. Then — and only then — open IDS to work through issues.
It's worth being precise about that V/TO review, because the 1-Year Plan actually gets used twice in this process, for two different reasons. In the session, the team reviews it to check progress — are we on track. Before the session, individually, each leader reviews it for a different purpose entirely: to figure out what their Rock should be for the next 90 days. One is a scorecard check. The other is planning input. Confusing the two is part of what slows a Quarterly down — a leader who walks in only having checked progress, and never having asked what that progress implies about their own next 90 days, still has real thinking left to do once the room is already waiting on them.
That order is deliberate, and it's one of the places where getting the sequence wrong quietly wrecks the session.
Here's what happens if you flip it. Open with IDS first, and the loudest problem in the room becomes the agenda. Whatever's on fire that week — a client escalation, a hiring gap, a vendor issue — pulls the team's attention and time before anyone has agreed on what actually matters for the next quarter. You end up spending ninety minutes reacting instead of deciding.
Set Rocks first, and IDS changes function entirely. Now the team isn't solving problems in the abstract — they're solving whatever stands between them and the priorities they just agreed on. Every issue gets filtered through one question: does this matter to the Rock? Not "does this feel urgent right now," which is a much lower bar and a much worse filter.
That's the difference between a leadership team that reacts to its business and one that directs it.
What a Rock Is Actually For
It's worth being precise here, because "Rock" gets used loosely, and loose usage leads to loose Rocks.
A Rock is not a to-do list. It's not a wish list, and it's not a container for everything a leader is thinking about that quarter. A Rock is a forcing function — a mechanism that takes everything your business could conceivably work on in the next 90 days and cuts it down to the 3 to 7 things that will actually move the needle.
The constraint is the point. A leadership team that hasn't been forced to choose hasn't actually prioritized — they've just made a longer list. Rocks work because they protect focus from noise. They give every leader a clear, singular answer to "what am I actually responsible for delivering this quarter," instead of a vague sense that everything matters roughly equally.
That clarity doesn't happen by accident inside a two-hour meeting. It happens because of what came before it.
Why the Fast Team Was Fast
The team that set their Rocks in 45 minutes didn't get there because they're smarter or more decisive as people. They got there because they prepared the right way.
Before the session, every leader had already reviewed the 1-Year Plan. They knew what the business had committed to for the year, so their quarterly thinking had a frame instead of starting from zero. They'd already looked at what else was in motion — the other strategic initiatives competing for the same time, budget, and people. And each leader walked in with their own rough answer to the real question a Rock is supposed to answer: what's the one thing I can deliver in the next 90 days that moves the whole company toward the 1-Year Plan, or shifts a strategic initiative that needs to move. Individual. One name on it.
None of that means the outcome was predetermined. The session still did real work — Rocks got challenged, language got sharpened, dependencies between leaders got surfaced and resolved. But the room wasn't where the thinking started. It was where individual thinking got tested against the rest of the leadership team and aligned.
Why the Slow Team Was Slow
The three-hour team also prepared. That's what makes this worth talking about — they weren't blank, they were busy. Each leader went back to their own department ahead of the session, gathered input from their people on what the next 90 days should prioritize, and came back with something that looked like a plan: a set of department Rocks, built with their team's input, ready to present.
That's the wrong kind of preparation, and it created more work, not less.
There's no such thing as a department Rock in EOS. A Rock belongs to one person. That's not a technicality — it's the entire mechanism that makes a Rock work. The moment a priority is owned by a department instead of an individual, accountability spreads across everyone on that team, which functionally means it belongs to no one. If the Rock doesn't get delivered, there's no single name to go to. Everyone had a hand in setting it, so everyone has a reason it wasn't fully on them.
So when that team walked into the Quarterly, they weren't showing up with individual, prioritized thinking ready to be pressure-tested. They were showing up with pre-built group consensus that had to be taken apart, re-examined against the 1-Year Plan, and reassigned to individual leaders — in the room, live, with six people watching one conversation unfold at a time. The department-level buy-in they'd worked to build before the session didn't save time. It had to be undone before real Rocks could get set.
Practice Happens Before Game Day
No award-winning team builds its game plan on game day. But practice only helps if the team is running the head coach's system. A team that spends the week before the game installing its own plays, department by department, still has to show up to game day — and then spend the first three quarters unlearning what they practiced before they can run what actually wins.
Your Quarterly session is game day. It's meant to be the place where individual leaders, already aligned to the same plan, commit and lock in — not the place where the team discovers, mid-game, that everyone practiced something different.
If your Quarterly consistently runs long, the problem usually isn't the session, and it isn't always a lack of preparation either. Sometimes the prep itself pointed the wrong direction — leaders solving for department consensus instead of individual ownership, before anyone checked that consensus against the 1-Year Plan. The room ends up doing correction work it was never designed to hold, and the actual work of aligning and committing gets squeezed into whatever time is left.
The Prep Sequence, in Order
If you want your next Quarterly to run like the 45-minute team's, the fix isn't a better meeting. It's better preparation before the meeting. In order:
Review the 1-Year Plan first — as planning input, not a progress check. This isn't the same review that happens inside the session, where the team checks whether they're on track against the year's goals. This is you, individually, asking what this quarter's progress toward the 1-Year Plan implies about the one thing you should own for the next 90 days. Every proposed Rock should trace back to that. If a leader can't connect their Rock to the 1-Year Plan, that's worth catching before the session, not during it.
Review what else is already in motion. Other departments' initiatives, ongoing projects, anything already consuming time and people. A Rock proposed in isolation, without accounting for what else is competing for the same resources, almost always turns out to be unrealistic by week three.
Draft your own rough answer before you walk in. Not to "what's my Rock" — that's too thin a question and produces thin Rocks. The real question is: what's the one thing I can deliver in the next 90 days that moves the whole company toward the 1-Year Plan, or shifts a strategic initiative that needs to change. Just a real attempt at that, and it needs to be yours. Leaders who show up with an individual starting point spend the session refining and aligning. Leaders who show up blank spend the session inventing, and everyone else waits on them to finish.
What doesn't belong in that sequence: taking a lap through your department first to build consensus on what the team's priorities should be. It feels like diligence, and it isn't wrong to want your team's input — but building a group-owned priority before the Quarterly sets you up to walk in with something that isn't a real Rock yet. It has to get broken back down to individual ownership in the room, which costs more time than it saved.
Do those three things consistently, and the Quarterly stops being where the thinking happens. It becomes what it's supposed to be: where individual thinking gets tested and the team leaves aligned.
The Real Question
The next time your Quarterly runs long, don't start by asking what went wrong in the room. Ask what didn't happen the week before it.
Did each leader walk in with an answer to the real question — what's the one thing I can deliver in the next 90 days that actually moves the company toward the 1-Year Plan — or did they walk in with a group's version of an answer, built somewhere else?
