How to set and cascade 90-day rocks across your organisation

Executive overview

Most teams stay busy but fail to move the needle because urgent tasks crowd out important ones. Rocks — 90-day goals drawn from EOS — fix the order: set the big priorities first, then let everything else fill in around them.

Start with the leadership team. Identify three to seven company-level goals, assign single ownership to each, and cascade them department by department until every employee holds a small set of aligned priorities.

The urgent is the enemy of the important — rocks force you to put first things first.

Why 90 days and where the name comes from

• Human attention drifts after roughly 90 days; shorter windows keep focus intact.
• The "rocks" metaphor comes from Stephen Covey's jar-of-life story: put rocks in first, then pebbles, then sand — everything fits. Reverse the order and it doesn't.
• EOS treats this as a 90-day world: set goals, review at quarter end, reset, repeat.

Setting company rocks with the leadership team

• Anchor thinking to the long-range plan: 10-year target → 3-year picture → 1-year plan → quarterly financial goals → current issues.
• Debate is healthy; expect 20 candidates and distill to three to seven.
• Every leadership team member must reach full agreement before the list is locked.
• Example outputs for a manufacturing company: deploy email marketing software, get the press into production, document a cash-flow analysis, begin the search for new office space.

Making each rock SMART

• Specific — state the exact deliverable, not a vague activity.
• Measurable — attach a metric (e.g., "20 hours of training", not "a lot of training").
• Attainable — scope it to what can realistically be completed in 90 days.
• Relevant — must tie to the 1-year, 3-year, or 10-year plan, or to a current issue.
• Time-based — must be completed by the agreed due date.

Assigning ownership

• Every rock gets exactly one owner, even when cross-department coordination is required.
• If two people share accountability, nobody is truly accountable — "we all tried hard" replaces a clear result.
• Break large rocks into sub-tasks with named leads and named dependencies; the lead owns the outcome regardless.

Cascading rocks through the organisation

• After company rocks are set, each department head adds their own three to seven departmental priorities.
• Department heads then meet with direct reports, distribute ownership of their rocks downward, and each report adds their own layer of priorities.
• This repeats level by level until every employee holds a set of goals aligned to the company targets.
• Capacity matters: a retailer in peak season takes fewer rocks; in a slow period, more.
• A 30-person company completing two rocks each per quarter delivers 240 meaningful outcomes a year.

Protecting rocks once set

• Do not remove rocks mid-quarter after discovering a mistake — absorb the lesson and flag them as off-track weekly.
• Do not add rocks mid-quarter; new urgencies should be deferred, not inserted.
• Mid-quarter changes cascade disruption downward through every level that inherited those goals.
• It typically takes two quarters to get comfortable with writing clear, well-scoped rocks.

How rocks fit with the other EOS tools

• Accountability chart — tells each person what their role is, so they know what to prioritise.
• Scorecard — catches day-to-day and week-to-week operational work; rocks catch strategic moves. Both are needed.
• L10 meeting — weekly check-in surfaces off-track rocks early enough to correct course.
• VTO (Vision/Traction Organiser) — ensures rocks are genuinely driving toward the 1-year, 3-year, and 10-year goals.