One of the most common things I hear from business owners is:
“We’ve been running EOS® for a while now.”
Brilliant.
Then I start asking a few questions.
Can I see your Accountability Chart®? How many measurables are on your Scorecard? How many Rocks does each person have? How are your Level 10 Meetings® running?
And somewhere in the conversation, I often hear something like:
“We’ve changed that part a little.”
Or:
“We found a better way that suits us.”
Or my personal favourite:
“We kind of do our own version.”
That is usually when I start to understand why they may not be getting the results they expected.
Sometimes the problem is not that EOS is not working.
It is that, over time, the business has gradually stopped running EOS.
Small Changes Can Create a Very Different System
Most leadership teams do not deliberately decide to throw out the system.
The changes usually happen slowly & with perfectly good intentions.
A meeting is shortened because everyone is busy. A tool gets changed because the original version feels uncomfortable. A step is skipped because the team does not immediately see its value. Something gets added because it seems useful.
None of those decisions feels particularly significant on its own.
But over time, enough small adjustments can create something quite different from the system the team originally set out to implement.
That matters because the EOS tools are designed to work together. Each one has a specific purpose & supports other parts of the system.
Change the purpose of the tool & you are likely to change the outcome too.
A Clarity Break Is Not a Strategy Meeting
I saw a great example of this recently.
A leadership team proudly told me they had introduced weekly Clarity Breaks.
Fantastic. I love seeing leaders deliberately creating time to think.
Then they explained what they were doing.
Every Thursday morning, the leadership team met at a local café. They sat in the sunshine, talked strategy, shared ideas & worked through bigger-picture issues together.
It sounded like a genuinely valuable meeting.
But it was not a Clarity Break.
It was a strategy meeting.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, there may be enormous value in creating time for those conversations.
But the distinction matters because the two activities are designed to achieve very different things.
A meeting is interactive. People exchange ideas, challenge assumptions, solve problems & build alignment.
A Clarity Break is about creating space for an individual leader to think.
No conversation. No interruptions. No notifications. No solving somebody else’s problem. Just uninterrupted thinking time.
Both can be useful.
They are simply not interchangeable.
You Need Time to Step Off the Dance Floor
One of my favourite ways to think about a Clarity Break is the difference between standing on the dance floor & looking down from the balcony.
Most business leaders spend an enormous amount of time on the dance floor.
They are answering questions, solving problems, responding to customers, making decisions, dealing with people & keeping everything moving.
When you are in the middle of all that activity, it can be difficult to see patterns.
Stepping onto the balcony gives you perspective.
You notice what keeps happening. You see where the business has become dependent on you. You recognise an issue that looks completely different when you are not caught in the middle of it. You give yourself enough space to think about where the business is going, rather than merely what needs doing next.
That kind of thinking is difficult to achieve while five other people are contributing to the conversation.
Which is exactly why the distinction matters.
Why Do Businesses Start Changing the Tools?
I do not think most self-implementers change EOS because they do not respect the system.
Usually, they are trying to make it work better.
“This will suit our business more.”
“We’ll just tweak this slightly.”
“We don’t really need that bit.”
“We can make this more efficient.”
The intention is usually sensible.
The risk comes when the team changes something before it properly understands why the original tool or discipline was designed that way.
There is a big difference between adapting something from a position of understanding & changing it because the discipline feels inconvenient.
Sometimes the part you are tempted to remove is the part creating the value.
It Happens Across the EOS Tools
Clarity Breaks are just one example.
I see similar drift in other parts of EOS.
A Level 10 Meeting gradually becomes a two-hour discussion session where every topic is explored as it appears rather than being dropped to the Issues List.
The V/TO® grows from a simple, focused tool into an elaborate strategy document that nobody regularly uses.
The Scorecard becomes a monthly financial report filled with information about what has already happened rather than a useful weekly view of whether the business is on track.
Rocks become normal business-as-usual work rather than the few important priorities that need focused attention during the quarter.
The Accountability Chart starts looking suspiciously like the traditional organisational chart it replaced, full of titles but unclear about genuine accountability.
Individually, each variation can look harmless.
Collectively, they can weaken the discipline of the entire system.
Think of It Like Making a Meringue
One analogy I love, courtesy of David Whyte, is making a meringue.
There is a recipe for a reason.
You need the right ingredients, the right method, the right timing & the right temperature.
Follow the recipe properly & you should end up with a meringue.
Decide that sugar seems excessive, substitute a few ingredients, change the temperature, skip a couple of steps because they seem unnecessary & you will still produce something.
It just may not be a meringue.
EOS is similar.
The individual elements work together.
Changing one thing without understanding how it connects to everything else can weaken another part of the system without you even realising it.
This does not mean a business should never think critically or evolve the way it works.
It means you are in a much stronger position to make intelligent changes once you properly understand the system you are changing.
Master the Fundamentals Before You Customise
There is a reason pilots learn standard procedures before relying on experience & instinct.
Fundamentals matter.
If you are still learning EOS, use the tools as they were intended for long enough to understand what they are actually doing for the business.
Notice where the discipline feels uncomfortable.
Sometimes that discomfort is telling you something useful.
Perhaps the Accountability Chart is exposing blurred ownership.
Perhaps the Scorecard is forcing you to decide which numbers genuinely matter.
Perhaps Rocks are making you choose rather than pretending everything is a priority.
Perhaps your Level 10 Meeting is exposing how easily your team gets pulled into operational detail.
Changing the tool may remove the discomfort.
It may also remove the lesson.
This Is Why I Work With Self-Implementers
This is one of the reasons I enjoy working with businesses that have implemented EOS themselves.
Most of them have already invested considerable time, energy & effort into getting the system running. They usually do not need someone to arrive & tell them everything they have done is wrong.
They often need a reset.
We might discover that the Accountability Chart needs tightening, the Scorecard needs simplifying or the leadership team’s Level 10 Meeting has gradually drifted away from the discipline that made it useful.
Sometimes the adjustments are surprisingly small.
But once the tools start doing the job they were designed to do again, the difference can be significant.
Take a Fresh Look at How You Are Running EOS
If you are self-implementing EOS, it is worth periodically looking at each tool with fresh eyes.
Are you still using it for the purpose it was designed for?
Have you changed it?
If so, why?
Was that an intentional decision based on a strong understanding of the tool, or did it slowly evolve because the original discipline became inconvenient?
And most importantly, are those changes helping you get better results?
There is nothing wrong with questioning how your business operates.
There is nothing wrong with looking for improvement either.
But if you keep changing the recipe, you cannot automatically blame the recipe when the result changes.
Sometimes gaining better Traction does not require another tool, another meeting or another clever idea.
Sometimes it requires going back to the fundamentals & doing the simple things properly.