Start the Year Strong: A Practical One-Day Annual Planning Session

A typical EOS® Annual Planning session is two full days when facilitated by a Professional or Certified Implementer. That extended format isn’t arbitrary – it gives teams the space to deepen trust, strengthen team health, surface relational dynamics, and work through issues with the kind of candor that’s hard to generate on your own.

If you’re not working with a facilitator, you may not need the full two-day container. A focused one-day annual planning session can work if you follow a clear structure and keep the conversation honest. Below is a proven agenda you can run internally with your leadership team.

       1. Review the Prior Year

Start with perspective. Have each team member individually reflect and share:

• What were the major wins?
• What challenges did we face, and how did we overcome them?
• What did we learn?

Then review the measurable elements:

• Revenue and profit targets vs. actuals
• Your previous year’s goals and how many were completed
• Each person assigns the year a letter grade
  

This isn’t an exercise in nostalgia; it’s a live conversation about alignment and learning. Make the discussion real, lively, and reflective.

       2. Review the Previous Quarter

Apply the same lens at a smaller scale:

• How many of our rocks did we complete?
• Did we hit our numbers (revenue / profit)?
• What worked? What didn’t?
• What did we learn?

Close the loop on the past so the team can focus fully on the future.

       3. Review and Update Your Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO)

Now turn the page.

Walk through the VTO line by line and ensure the team remains aligned on your core vision. Make updates where needed. This includes rewriting your Three-Year Picture, pushing it out another year.

The VTO should feel true, not aspirational wallpaper. Debate until it does.

If you don’t have a V/TO complete, you can review a tutorial on how to create one here.

       4. Conduct a SWOT Analysis

Work through Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats

This is not just an intellectual exercise—it expands the team’s thinking and primes the system for the next step: identifying real issues.

       5. Complete the Organizational Checkup

Do the EOS Organizational Checkup as a team. This will highlight structural gaps in your execution system and give you a sense of how close you are to the EOS benchmark of “80% strong” in the Six Key Components.

This step often reveals issues that haven’t been named explicitly.

Find the organizational checkup here.

       6. Build a Comprehensive Issues List

Combine insights from:

• The SWOT
• The Organizational Checkup
• Any lingering or emerging team concerns

Not everything from the SWOT will be an “issue.” That’s fine. The goal is to create a true list of what stands between you and your vision—organizational, strategic, or relational.

       7. Create Your One-Year Plan

Now shift from diagnostics to commitment.

Ask each team member to privately write down what they believe are the three to seven most important priorities for the coming year. These should be big, outcome-level goals, not 90-day projects.

Then go around the room one at a time:

• Share one priority
• Discuss
• Decide if it belongs on the final list
• Keep it, refine it, or remove it
• Move to the next

Aim for three to seven goals. Remember: more is not better.

Define your revenue and profit target for the year and sanity-check that it aligns with your Three-Year Picture.

       8. Set Your Quarterly Rocks

Using your One-Year Plan as the guidepost, determine the company rocks for the next quarter. These are the concrete steps or milestones needed to move meaningfully toward your annual goals – or to address the most urgent issues facing the business.

Again: three to seven company rocks is the sweet spot.

After that, each leader selects their own three to seven individual rocks, including any company rocks that were assigned to them.

Set revenue and profit targets for the upcoming quarter as well.

       9. Clean Up and Prioritize the Issues List

End by reviewing the full issues list:

• Which issues have been resolved through your goals or rocks?
• Which need attention this quarter?
• Which should be pushed to the long-term issues list?

This clean-up step ensures you’re not dragging noise into your next Quarterly Session.

A Tool to Help You Run the Entire Process

If you want structure, clarity, and a place to store all of this thinking, ninety.io is an excellent tool. It handles your VTO, issues list, rocks, scorecards, agendas, and quarterly/annual planning workflow—making it much easier to run this entire process without dropping threads or losing momentum. For teams running EOS internally, it keeps everything organized, visible, and accountable. Try a free 30-day trial of ninety.io to manage your EOS process and material.