Annual Planning

The two days replace one quarterly session, so a year holds three quarterlies and one annual. EOS asks for it offsite with phones away, because the conversations that only happen once a year are the ones about seats at the top and about whether the three-year picture is still what the team wants. It ends the way a quarterly does.

The extra day buys the thing a single-day session cannot: time to be honest about each other before deciding anything. Teams that treat the annual as one more quarterly get a budget and no change in behavior. The team health work at the start is what makes the second day's arguments useful rather than polite.

Worked example: An air conditioning company with a hundred and twenty staff spent the first morning on an exercise about what each leader finds hardest about the others. It was awkward for an hour. The sales and service directors had been running parallel scheduling systems for two years out of mutual distrust, and it came out there rather than in the budget.

Sources: Traction, Gino Wickman, chapter on the Meeting Pulse; eosworldwide.com/eos-process