Meeting sections
Flight Path
Quarterly rocks with an owner, a due date and the milestones that make on-track mean something.
In EOS®: Rocks
Flight Path is the quarterly Rocks your team commits to, one owner each. The EOS Toolbox™
Flight Path holds the rocks: the handful of things this crew has committed to finishing in the next ninety days. Three to seven per person is the usual shape. In the meeting the gate takes five minutes, because each rock gets one word: on track, or off track.
What a rock carries#
- Title
- The outcome, not the activity. "New pricing live on the site" beats "work on pricing".
- Owner
- One person. Not a department, not two names. A rock with two owners has none.
- Due date
- Usually the last day of the quarter.
- Status
- On track, off track, or pending. Set by the owner, said out loud in the meeting.
- Milestones
- The steps that get the rock done. Tick them off as you go.
- Notes
- Context, links and updates. Edited live during a flight, so two people can work the same rock at once.
Milestones do the real work#
A rock with milestones reports its own progress: the percentage is worked out from how many are ticked, not from a number the owner picks. That is the difference between a rock that is genuinely on track in week four and one that is about to be a surprise in week twelve.
A rock with no milestones keeps a progress figure you set by hand, which is fine for something genuinely atomic. Break down anything that is not.
Off-track rocks#
Marking a rock off track is not the end of the conversation, it is the start of one, and the conversation does not happen in this gate. Convert the rock into an issue and it drops into Land the Plane with its title and context intact, to be solved when the crew gets to the issues list.
Rocks convert both ways:
- An off-track rock becomes an issue to solve.
- An issue that keeps coming back every week is usually a rock nobody has set yet, and can be converted into one.
Through the quarter#
Set rocks once at the start of the quarter, then leave the list alone. Adding a rock in week seven is almost always a sign that something else should have come off the list, and the meeting is where that trade gets made, not the rock editor.
You can import an existing rock list, milestones included, from Ninety or a spreadsheet. See Importing your data.
Each rock can carry an icon, which makes a long list scannable in a meeting. Purely cosmetic, and worth the ten seconds. Set it from the rock's Edit panel.