Quarterly Planning for Leadership Teams: The Agenda, Setting Rocks That Get Done, and the AI-Assisted Version

By Andreas Pettersson, Founder, Leaders ADAPT

Here is what happens when a leadership team sets ten Rocks. Week two feels productive. Week six, three owners are quietly behind. Week eleven, two Rocks are done, and nobody can say which of the other eight mattered.

That is not an execution problem. That is a quarterly planning problem that shows up late.

I have run EOS for years, at Arcules and now at Leaders ADAPT.

Setting ten Rocks and then failing at all ten is one of the biggest failures I see. We were most successful when we had between one and three per quarter, and the same goes for now. This page gives you the quarterly planning day, the Rock rules that actually get Rocks done, and where AI helps. It is part of our guide to AI for EOS companies.

What does a quarterly planning meeting agenda look like?

Quarterly planning is the leadership team's 90 day reset: close the last quarter honestly, choose the few things that matter next, and give each one a single owner.

Search for a quarterly planning agenda and you will find two kinds: a vendor's fixed script, or a blank template. This is the one day agenda I would run. It is our own design, not the standard EOS quarterly meeting agenda, and the times assume a leadership team of five to eight people.

The day is only as good as the preparation. Delegate the prep work weeks ahead.

Ask each leader to bring a viewpoint from their own function, in writing. If people show up stressed, unprepared and unread, they come in with the wrong mindset. Prime the pump.

Then tell people straight up, ahead of time, what is on the table. Do not trick anyone into a hard conversation in the room.

And have the follow up rhythm ready for the moment you are back in the office. The Rocks go into Monday's Level 10 Meeting, every week. Otherwise it's just a meeting.

That weekly carry is where most Rocks quietly die, and it is the reason the rhythm protocol in the 5 Minute Leader exists.

How many Rocks should a company set? One to three

I am absolutely on board with Rocks. I am just much stricter about the number than most.

The Rock Stack is one to three company Rocks, ideally one, with at most one supporting Rock per leader, each supporting Rock being a piece of a company Rock or preparation for next quarter's.

Why so few? Because every extra Rock splits the same leadership attention. If the organization can get as close as possible to one company wide Rock, with everything else a subdivision of it or groundwork for a future quarter's Rock, things are aligned and the work gets done much better.

EOS guidance allows more: three to seven company Rocks a quarter, according to an EOS Worldwide post on Rocks (read September 2026). I think that is too many for most companies under 100 people. An EOS implementer I spoke with named both failure modes: teams commonly take on too much, and some sandbag and take too little. Both become cultural if nobody names them.

Some teams call the result a 90 day plan. The label does not matter. What matters is that the quarterly Rocks are few, owned and measurable.

I also push for 90 day targets with a measurable finish line. That is where I borrow from OKRs. Rocks are the right unit for the leadership table, and key results are a very good way to think about how you measure them. The trade offs between the two systems are on our page comparing EOS vs OKRs.

What makes a good Rock? Examples by function

A good Rock passes five tests:

• One owner, by name.
• A finish line you can check on day 90 without debate.
• Too big for a week, small enough for a quarter.
• Tied to a company Rock, or preparing next quarter's.
• Something the owner can actually move with their own authority.

The implementer I mentioned made a useful point here: Rocks do not have to be completely separate from the job. Sometimes the best Rock is doing a core part of the job measurably better.

Here is what a Rock Stack looks like for a company whose one company Rock is a new service line. The examples are illustrative, not a template to copy.

If you need help with the wording of each goal, the SMART goals format still works. Our page on company goals covers it.

Should you change Rocks mid quarter?

EOS is strict here. Hold the Rock for 90 days. I am less hardcore than that.

There is too much rigidity in EOS at the beginning, and Rocks are where you feel it. When the business changes inside a quarter, the plan should be allowed to change with it.

A story from my own time running EOS. One implementer we worked with insisted we stick to the quarterly targets no matter what.

Over time I felt the real reason was the implementer's calendar: showing up at our door every third month, clients spaced out neatly. Meanwhile we had real business situations where we had to pivot. The process was serving the schedule, not the company.

So here is my rule. Change a Rock when a real event changes the business: a lost anchor customer, a new market, a funding round.

Do it openly in the L10, write down the reason, and confirm the owner. Do not change a Rock because it got boring. That is a different problem, and we cover it in shiny object syndrome.

When should the quarterly planning day happen? Before the board, not after

This is the fix that mattered most at Arcules.

Our cadence was weekly L10s, quarterly Rock reviews, monthly performance reviews of the numbers and quarterly reporting to Canon. In the beginning we did not time those. Board preparation and quarterly planning collided. The collision caused real friction, and for a while the team questioned whether EOS was the right model at all.

Then we changed the order. We made sure last quarter was fully closed before board prep began, and the new Rocks were set before any board or Canon report was due. By the time we built the board slides, we had already been offsite, argued it out and resolved most of the issues. We walked in aligned.

Canon ran a big company planning process, mature and long. A startup runs on quick iteration, less time planning and more time failing and learning. Much of our time went into extrapolating numbers our daily rhythm never captured, purely to satisfy Canon's process. Timing the quarter first meant that work fed the board instead of fighting it.

If you report to a board, put your quarterly planning day in the calendar before the board pack, every quarter.

Where AI fits in quarterly planning, and what stays human

AI is very good at the paperwork around a quarter. It is no good at choosing the quarter.

Where it helps:

• Collects Rock status from each owner every week and flags the ones slipping.
• Writes the close the quarter pre-read from the scorecard and the Rock history.
• Drafts candidate Rocks from the issues list and the scorecard trend, for the team to cut.
• Captures decisions and to-dos on the day and drafts the cascade message.

What stays human:

• Which one to three Rocks win.
• Who owns each Rock, and whether that person can carry it.
• The call to change a Rock mid quarter.
• What happens when a Rock owner misses again.
• The commitments reported to the board.
• The conversation with a leader whose Rock quietly died.

Prioritisation is the job. Hand that to a model and you have handed it your strategy. The line is drawn in more detail in what not to delegate to AI, and the full component map is in the AI for EOS companies guide.

What quarterly planning does not fix

A good quarterly planning day does not fix a leader who commits on Friday and drifts by Wednesday.

It does not fix a CEO who sets the Rocks alone and calls it a team decision. And it does not fix a leadership team that will not tell one of its own that their Rock is off track. EOS gives you the rhythm. It lacks the how when it comes to leadership: how to delegate a Rock properly, how to hold someone accountable for it, how to give the feedback in week four rather than week twelve.

That is what our leadership team development guide is for. If you are still weighing the system itself, see our independent verdict on EOS.

After the quarter, the review looks backward. Our page on the quarterly business review covers that meeting, and the annual planning page covers the two day version.

One question for you. How many Rocks did your leadership team set at your last quarterly planning day, and how many got done? Send me both numbers.

Common questions about quarterly planning

What is quarterly planning?

Quarterly planning is a leadership team meeting held every 90 days to close the previous quarter and set priorities for the next one. The team reviews results and unfinished priorities, checks the annual plan, resolves the largest open issues and agrees a short list of goals with one owner each. In EOS these quarterly priorities are called Rocks.

How many Rocks should a company have each quarter?

Fewer than most teams set. Leaders ADAPT recommends one to three company Rocks, ideally one, with at most one supporting Rock per person underneath. EOS Worldwide guidance allows three to seven company Rocks a quarter. Teams that set ten or more usually spread effort too thin and finish few of them, which weakens trust in the process.

What is the 80 percent Rock completion rule?

The 80 percent figure is a benchmark that circulates among EOS teams rather than a formal rule. An EOS Worldwide blog post from April 2024 describes clients reaching 80 to 100 percent Rock completion (read September 2026). Teams with only one to three Rocks usually look past the percentage to which Rock was missed, why, and what that reveals.

Can you change Rocks in the middle of a quarter?

EOS favours holding Rocks steady for the full 90 days so teams build execution discipline. In practice, a real change in the business, such as a lost customer, a new market opening or a funding event, can justify changing a Rock. The change should be made openly in the weekly leadership meeting, with the reason recorded and a new owner confirmed.

What is the difference between quarterly planning and a quarterly business review?

Quarterly planning looks forward. It sets the next 90 days of priorities, owners and deadlines. A quarterly business review looks back, examining financial and operating results against plan and explaining the variance. Many leadership teams hold the review first, then use its findings as the opening input to the quarterly planning day.

What are examples of EOS Rocks?

Good Rocks are specific outcomes with one owner and a finish line at 90 days. Examples include signing five customers for a new service line, documenting and training the delivery process for that line, hiring a named role, separating fixed and variable cost reporting, or migrating the sales pipeline into one CRM with clean data.

Your next question

• The Level 10 Meeting: where your Rocks get reviewed every Monday.
• Visionary vs Integrator: who owns the quarter when the two seats disagree.
• The 5 Minute Leader: the protocols that make quarterly planning stick between the planning days.