Glossary
Traction
Traction is the EOS® word for the discipline and accountability that turn a plan into finished work, and it is the sixth of the six components. In practice it means two things a team can point at: Rocks every ninety days, and a weekly meeting that closes issues. The rest of the system produces intentions; this produces movement.
01
Traction as the sixth component
Traction sits at the bottom of the EOS Model® holding up the other five components, and it is where a rollout starts. A leadership team gets Rocks and a Level 10 Meeting™ on the Focus Day®, before any of the vision work. The reason given is that a team with no execution habit will write an excellent plan and not do it.
Most companies are not short of good ideas. The 2007 book that introduced the system took its name from this component, which tells you where the author thought the problem was. A vision the team believes in and cannot deliver produces more cynicism than no vision at all, because now the failure is public and dated.
Worked example: A professional services firm had run a strategy offsite every year for five years, and the plans were sound. In its first quarter with a weekly meeting and five Rocks, the team finished three things that had appeared on all five of those plans, including a fee review nobody had ever been asked to own.
Sources: Traction, Gino Wickman, chapter on Traction; What the Heck is EOS?, Gino Wickman and Tom Bouwer
Rocks
A Rock is one of the three to seven priorities a team commits to finishing in the next ninety days, with one owner and a clear finish line.
02Level 10 Meeting
The Level 10 Meeting is a ninety-minute weekly leadership meeting that runs the same agenda every week and ends on the hour.
03EOS Model
The EOS Model is the one-page diagram of the whole system: six components arranged in the order a leadership team is meant to strengthen them.
04Quarterly Pulsing
Quarterly pulsing is the habit of resetting priorities every ninety days, on the argument that a group of people loses focus after about a quarter.
05KPIs and EOS: build a Scorecard that predicts results
Where KPIs fit inside EOS: the weekly Scorecard, 5 to 15 measurables, one owner each, and a simple picker to draft yours by industry in a few minutes.
Start with a real question
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