I was watching Rally Cap on the SEC Network yesterday and Haylie McCleney, the former Alabama outfielder and Team USA Olympic medalist, said something I’ve been thinking about since.
“Everything happens before it happens.”
She attributed it to Patrick Murphy, her coach at Alabama Softball.
The context was clutch hitting. How does an elite hitter stay calm with bases loaded, two outs, and a full count? The answer isn’t about that moment. The answer is everything she did months and years before that moment, so the moment becomes the inevitable byproduct of preparation already complete.
It stopped me in my tracks because it’s the entire logic of EOS in five words.
- Great weeks start on Sunday night (or the Clarity Break on Friday Afternoon) when you plan the week
- Great quarters don’t start in the first Rock review. They start in the Clarity Break before the Quarterly Session that surfaced the issues, opportunities which became candidate and then Rocks.
- Great years don’t start January 1. They start at the Annual Session earlier, when the leadership team did the hard work of looking each other in the eye and agreeing on where the company is going and how it will get there.
- Great EOS implementations don’t start at the first Quarterly. They start at Focus Day, Vision Building Day 1, and Vision Building Day 2. Three full days of leadership teams sitting in a room together, doing the work most companies never make time for. Defining the Accountability Chart. Stress-testing the Vision. Putting names next to numbers on the Scorecard. Saying out loud what has been avoided.
By the time the team gets to their 2nd or 3rd Quarterly, what looks “clutch” to outsiders is the inevitable byproduct of preparation already complete.
Companies that do this work grow roughly 2.8x faster than companies that don’t.
I’ve watched it for over a decade. Teams have talent. Some get a lucky bounce here and there. But the most inevitable thing in business is the team that does the work nobody else was willing to do, when nobody was watching.
“Everything happens before it happens.”
If your team feels behind, the question isn’t what to do this week. The question is “What work did you put off doing six months ago?”
And most importantly “What are we going to do now to make growth inevitable 9 months from now?”