The Scorecard runs first. Five to 15 numbers, five minutes, each owner saying on track or off track. Then Rocks, same two words, same five minutes.
The Scorecard owner is reading a result. Somebody counted something against a goal set before the quarter started, and the two words are what the count came to.
The Rock owner is doing something else. In the few seconds before they speak, they’re deciding whether 90 days of work is going to land.
Two kinds of report, delivered in the same words, back to back, and the meeting has no way to tell them apart.
What the Scorecard segment has that the Rock segment doesn’t
The Scorecard is designed all the way through. Each number has an owner, a goal, and a source, and all three were set before the week began. Reporting it is a lookup. The two words are short because everything that makes them true is already written down.
A Rock gets the first half of that treatment. Named, specific, measurable, one owner, 90 days. EOS is careful here and the care pays off, because a company that sets Rocks this way has decided what its quarter is for.
Then the quarter happens, and nothing else gets written down. Under the number there’s a count. Under the Rock there’s nothing.
The two reports are short for different reasons. The Scorecard is short because the work of making it true happened in advance. The Rock is short because the owner has nothing to read from but their intuition.
A forecast in the voice of a measurement
The Rock owner’s read is usually good. They’re closer to the work than anyone else in the room, they know more about it than the rest of the team combined, and most weeks their answer is right.
A judgment reported in the same two words as a measurement gets heard as a measurement. Nobody in the room can tell which one they just received. The format flattens both into the same shape.
The difference shows up in how each one fails. A count that comes up short reports as off track that week, because the count is the count. An intuition can read on track for 11 straight weeks and still be wrong, and no single week produces a bad report, because in every one of those weeks the owner had good reason to believe it would ultimately succeed.
There’s also a pull toward the on track answer. The team won’t have to discuss and “solve” it. Off track spends part of the 60 minutes set aside for IDS, so a person who isn’t sure will say on track, and mean it, because unsure isn’t one of the two options.
Give the Rock what the Scorecard already has
The fix comes from inside EOS rather than on top of it. Put one line under the Rock that the two words can be checked against, written by the owner before the meeting.
A Rock rarely has a number to count. What it has is a desired change in the world.
Say the Rock reads: cut manual reporting time for pilot clients by 50 percent with a new dashboard, by the end of the quarter. Three kinds of change are worth a line under it.
Observable change toward the Rock. Something moved in the real world. Two pilot clients measured their current reporting at 8 to 10 hours a week, which sets the baseline the 50 percent comes off.
Internal progress that moves the odds. Nothing visible outside the team yet, and the Rock got more likely to complete. The data model wouldn’t support automated reports, so the schema was redesigned, and now it will.
A discovery that changes what success means. Client reporting formats vary more than the dashboard design assumed, so 50 percent won’t be the expected target across the whole pilot group.
The fourth valid answer is: No material change this week. People worked and nothing happened that moves the Rock. Written down, that’s a real report, and it’s the only one of the four the current format can’t express.
One line, beside the Rock, wherever the Rocks already live. The review still runs on two words, so the segment still takes five minutes.
Three weeks of no material change is the quarter-end failure arriving in week three.
Three weeks of no material change is the quarter-end failure arriving in week three. Right now it reports as on track, three times, and every one of those is honest and potentially wrong at the same time.
If this is the kind of thing you want more of, the longer arguments live at Good Work at a Distance.