1-Year Plan

The plan is set at the annual session and then cut into quarters. Every Rock a leadership team sets is supposed to move one of the goals, which is the check that keeps a quarter from filling up with urgent work. At each quarterly the team reads the goals first and marks them, then argues about the next ninety days.

Annual plans usually run to fifteen items because nobody wants to be the person whose idea got dropped. Capping the list at seven forces that argument in January rather than in October, by which point the fifteenth item has quietly become nobody's job and most of the year has been spent.

Worked example: A food manufacturer set five goals for the year, among them moving to a second shift and getting a safety certification. By the third quarter the certification was done and the second shift was not. The reason was visible in the Rocks, where nobody had taken it in quarter one or two. It got a named owner and a date.

Sources: Traction, Gino Wickman, chapter on Vision; Get a Grip, Gino Wickman and Mike Paton