An essay by John Melonakos
Quarterly Offsite Planning Meetings
In August, I wrote how we have implemented the Third EOS Step: Meeting Rhythm. Today we held our first EOS Quarterly Meeting.
We rented space offsite for the management team to review Q3 and make plans for Q4. The ability to get away from familiar environments was good to throw us into reset mode for more effective thinking and planning.
The agenda for the meeting was as follows:
- Segue
- Each person shares three things: (1) best business and personal news in the last 90 days, (2) what is working and not working in the organization, and (3) expectations for the day.
- Review previous quarter’s Rocks. These are the specific objectives we set for Q3.
- For each Rock, we determined if it was complete or incomplete. For incomplete Rocks, we took one of 3 actions: (1) Carried the Rock forward to the next quarter, (2) If the Rock was 95 percent complete, completing the last 5 percent simply became an action item for the To-Do List, or (3) Reassigned the Rock to someone else.
- Review the V/TO
- Since we’ve not yet completed the V/TO step of EOS, we skipped this step.
- Establish next quarter’s Rocks & Tackle key issues
- This is the bulk of the meeting.
- It starts by listing all the issues and major projects of the business on the whiteboard.
- Then it proceeds by discussing each issue in-depth.
- Finally, it is determined if the issues deserve attention in Q4 or not. Those that are worthy of attention are assigned an owner and designation as a Q4 Rock.
- Next steps
- Final coordination and logistics are communicated.
- Conclude
- Everyone shared three things: (1) feedback on the meeting, (2) whether their expectations were met or not, and (3) their rating on the meeting from 1 to 10.
It was a great first EOS Quarterly meeting, and we came away from it ready to crush the next quarter!
What quarterly meetings does your startup do?