A lot of people think Abraham Lincoln made an exceptional observation about planning. “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Now, Lincoln almost certainly never said this*, but it’s still a terrific illustration of the importance of readiness and, by extension, planning.
For companies running on EOS®, Quarterly and Annual Planning sessions are inescapably essential. At M&R, these sessions give us the space to zoom out, re-center on our Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO)®, and align our team for the coming months or year.
Without intentional preparation, though, these meetings can quickly slide into tactical chatter and pointless circular conversations. Here’s how we prep to ensure our Quarterlies and Annuals lead to clarity, energy, and momentum.
Why Quarterly & Annual Planning Matters
Planning can be terrifying. Sitting down with a white sheet of paper and giving yourself the mission of planning out your business’s operations for the next couple of years is impossibly daunting. But planning next month’s agenda? That’s a much lighter lift, and it’s the reason for one of the significant benefits of running on EOS®.
EOS® breaks down the “long game” into manageable chunks. Annuals set the big picture, Quarterlies reset momentum and focus. Together, they ensure you’re always aligning to vision, not just reacting.
Step 1: Prepping the Leadership Team
Before we can do any planning, we have to start with some prep work. Since our Quarterly and Annual planning sessions are limited to our executives and production team leads, we rely on the team leaders to represent their units effectively and ensure that our planning encompasses the actual challenges our company is facing.
We ask each leader to arrive at each planning session ready with:
A review of their Rocks (complete or incomplete)
When done well, Rocks build on one another over time to effect foundational improvements in how the business runs. At M&R, most of our new programs and initiatives emerge from a series of Rocks that are tackled in multiple departments over a few quarters; having a solid understanding of the status of completed, ongoing, and upcoming Rocks is crucial to these projects’ success.
The top three issues they see in their department
Notice that we’re not asking for the top three issues they see in the company. That feedback is welcome, too, but as their unit’s representative at the planning table, they need to communicate the specific, often unique issues impacting their specific part of the operation.
Data on their scorecard metrics
If you’re familiar with EOS®, you understand the importance of making data-driven decisions. While each of our separate units may track certain metrics more than others, we have a set of common metrics that apply across our entire organization. In our case, these metrics speak primarily to effectiveness and efficiency in project completion, keeping the focus on a few actionable numbers that we can impact with our strategic decisions.
Feedback from their team members
Some of the best ideas we’ve ever embraced at M&R have come from outside the c-suite. Some of the most significant problems we’ve solved have come to our attention thanks to emails from new staff members. We value every employee’s feedback, and the input from across the company is a vital part of the data stream that goes into our planning decisions.
This detailed preparation ensures we don’t waste time “catching up” in the meeting, but that we come in ready to prioritize.
Step 2: Reviewing the V/TO®
We often speak of traction as a transitive thing – we either “have traction” or we don’t – instead of as a practice.
Traction isn’t something you have; it’s something you create, and the way to consistently create something that works is to do it over and over again.
In this case, we’re talking about creating the traction our team needs to meet our growth goals and ensuring that the traction we do have aligns with our vision. The tool for that in the EOS® ecosystem is the Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO)®.
It doesn’t matter if any part of our long-term vision or the shorter-term strategies we’re using to make progress toward that vision have changed in the last quarter or not. Every time we sit down to create strategic plans for our company, we open with a review of our V/TO®: our Core Values, 10-Year Target, and 3-Year Picture.
This review allows for a few things:
- It forces us into a strategic mindset. By reminding us of our big-picture goals (and how much yardage we have to pick up before we get there), we enter the conversation thinking about how we can make progress towards the long-term vision.
- It demands that we take an honest stock of our status. If we’ve been making edge calls that aren’t serving our vision, a V/TO® review is always a good way to reset our perspective and get us back into a mindset of making vision-focused decisions.
- It refreshes and reinforces our actual vision. Over time, the repetition ensures that our leadership team has our vision and values front-of-mind. This makes it much easier for them to make quick decisions that are actually aligned with our desired trajectory.
There’s another, ancillary benefit to these V/TO® reviews: they help keep our Integrator and our Visionary on the same page. In Rocket Fuel®, the EOS text that defines the roles of Integrator and Visionary, authors Gino Wickman and Winters devote a significant amount of ink to the importance of “same pageness” – the idea that the captain and executive officer of the ship are both reading off the same chart. They write, “As an effective V/I duo, you really must be on the same page. If not, you’ll either make your team uncomfortable or give them mixed messages.”
While M&R’s V/I duo has regular Same Page Meetings, the quarterly V/TO® review is a chance for them to consider strategic-level same-pageness.
Step 3: Making the Meeting Strategic (Not Tactical)
“So, how are we going to do it?” Someone has asked that question in nearly every planning meeting in the history of the world. 99.9% of those meetings turned into counterproductive slogs just a few minutes after that question was asked.
“How?” is a tactical question. It comes last. Until you know the answers to the strategic-level questions:
- What do we want to accomplish?
- Why do we want to accomplish it?
- Will accomplishing it help us attain our vision?
- When does it need to be accomplished?
- Why does this take priority over other tasks?
…then there’s not much point in discussing “how.” Bringing the h-word into a strategic discussion too early is a tried-and-true method for bringing progress to a screeching halt.
Our Quarterly or Annual planning facilitator helps us push past the temptation to discuss “how” too early. Instead, we focus on clarity: What needs to be true by year’s end? What matters most this quarter? Why does it matter?
Step 4: Setting Great Rocks
Once we know what our specific goals for the quarter or year are, then it’s time to ask “How?” Except, we already know the how: Rocks.
We mentioned Rocks above; they’re internal projects that help move our business forward: improving processes, implementing new workflows, developing skills, and making other incremental changes.
Setting great Rocks is a vital part of running on EOS®. To borrow from the old business-school cliché, rocks make it possible to rebuild the car while it’s driving down the highway, and we’ve found them to be invaluable. We’ve also found that our teams love working on Rocks: it gives them some ownership in our company’s growth and affords them a chance to set down client work for a couple of hours each week and work on something different.
We’ve written an article about setting effective Rocks for your company; check it out: A Comprehensive Guide to Creating Rocks for your EOS Company
Step 5: Ending with Energy
All too often, meetings that leave each participant with a long list of takeaways and to-dos end on a down note. “Well, now I have all of this extra work to do.”
Why is that? Usually, it’s because the table did a great job of handing out action items, but didn’t do such a great job of ensuring that everyone knew why they had these new entries on their checklist.
What we’ve always found is that when:
- We are all adequately prepared for the meeting,
- We start each planning session with a review of our long-term goals and vision,
- We have solid data to start our conversations,
- And we limit our discussions to strategic questions, not getting mired in tactical detail,
…the meeting ends on a high-energy note. We haven’t bogged everyone down with endless discussions of minute details, we haven’t handed out micromanaged to-do lists, and we haven’t handed out any work that doesn’t address a specific, articulated need.
Instead, the meeting has accomplished its task: keeping everyone aligned, motivated, thinking strategically, and enthusiastic about the coming months.
Supporting EOS® Companies with Marketing That Delivers
At M&R, we use EOS® in our own business, so we understand how marketing can work within your system to support goals, track priorities, and drive results.
We have guided numerous EOS® organizations to increase visibility, generate more leads, and establish accountability in their marketing efforts. Every strategy we create ties directly to your Vision/Traction Organizer and aligns with the objectives your team monitors each week.
Call 478-621-4491 to connect with a business development manager and get ideas you can bring to your next L10.
*Honest Abe grew up farming in the early 19th Century; he would never have needed four hours to put a razor-sharp edge on an axe.