There’s a well-known story about a teacher who walks into a classroom carrying a large glass jar, a pile of fist-sized rocks, some gravel, sand, and a jug of water. The teacher fills the jar with the big rocks and asks the class, “Is it full?” The class says yes. Then comes the gravel, shaken down into the gaps. Full now? The class is not so sure. Then the sand fills the spaces between the gravel. Then the water.
The lesson isn’t that you can always squeeze more in. It’s the opposite. If you’d started with the sand, the big rocks would never have fitted at all! In this story, the rocks symbolise your most important goals or areas of focus.
Stephen Covey popularised this idea back in the 1990s in his book, First Things First. And the message has endured because it speaks directly to one of the most common problems in operations: teams that are busy but not necessarily moving forward.
If the big rocks don’t go in first, they aren’t going to fit in later. Stephen R Covey
Busy isn’t the same as effective
Leaders can often mistake activity for progress. Long to-do lists. Multiple initiatives are running in parallel. Action plans with ten bullet points that somehow never quite shift the numbers. This all feels productive, but it spreads focus so thin that nothing gets the attention it needs to change.
Vague plans are particularly damaging. When actions aren’t specific, owned, or tied to a clear outcome, they become wallpaper – present but unnoticed. The antidote isn’t more planning. It’s better planning: fewer priorities, sharper commitments, and a genuine understanding of what will move the needle and what won’t. That’s where Big Rock action plans come in – structured tools to cut through the noise and focus effort on what truly matters over the next 90 days.
Big Rock thinking
In practice, Big Rock thinking starts with an honest review of your KPIs.
- Where are you now?
- Where do you need to be?
- Which gaps matter most?
Not every underperforming metric is a Big Rock – only the ones where real, lasting change is possible and necessary. It’s also true to say that Big Rocks aren’t just about where there is an underperforming metric. A big rock could be something that you really want to make progress with or enhance, even though it’s not a problem. It’s not just a problem to mitigate; it could be an opportunity to exploit.
From that review, you identify one, two, or three priorities for the next 90 days. Not a list of tasks, or a continuation of business as usual. But a genuine commitment to change – whether that’s tackling a persistent problem like food waste or staff turnover, or seizing an opportunity like growing sales or improving the guest experience.
If you work on the gravel first, there’s never time for the Big Rocks. You can never get ahead by just sorting through the gravel faster. But if you prioritise the Big Rocks first, the gravel falls into place as appropriate. FranklinCovey
Big Rocks come from your mission, goals or key projects and can be tasks, appointments or areas of focus. Once the priorities are identified, the plan is built around two components: lag and lead measures.
Lag measures – defining success
A lag measure describes the result you’re trying to achieve. It tells you whether you got there, but only after the fact – you can’t control it directly day to day. That’s why it needs to be written with precision, in the form of ‘from X to Y by when’.
The problem is that vague lag measures produce vague plans:
Vague – improve guest feedback.
Clear – increase guest satisfaction score from 72% to 80% by 31 May.
The clearer the destination, the easier it is to work out what actions will get you there.
Lead measures – driving results
Lead measures are the frequent behaviours that make the lag measure more likely to move. They’re predictive rather than historical – you can track them in real time, which is what makes them useful. They could be daily, weekly, two to three times a week or maybe even monthly. We do need to be careful that people don’t identify lead measures as actions they do once or twice a quarter, as it’s highly unlikely that an action conducted that infrequently will make a difference. I sometimes liken it to someone who wants to get fit by running. If they ran twice in three months, they probably wouldn’t get fit. If they were running two or three times a week, maybe only a short distance at first, building up every week, week on week, that would make a real difference and get them to the ability where they could run a 5k or a marathon in three months.
A strong lead measure is influenceable (you control it), predictive (doing it consistently genuinely shifts the outcome), and repeatable (it happens on a defined cadence, not just when you get around to it).
This is where most plans go wrong. Three common mistakes include:
- Preparation dressed up as action: reviewing data or creating a training plan are useful starting points, but they’re one-off tasks. Once done, they stop. A lead measure needs to keep happening. One of our clients once referred to this as the “so what” question. Once you’ve reviewed the data, what are you going to do with that knowledge? What difference does it make? What happens if you do or don’t look at it? How will it improve performance?
- Outcomes listed as actions: improving engagement or raising standards are results, not behaviours. If you can’t physically do it, it isn’t a lead measure. Again, the challenge here is to get specific about the action or behaviour you’re going to take to achieve the outcome you want, not just to state the outcome.
- Vague commitments: ongoing support to managers or regular focus on standards sound credible, but without a defined frequency and a clear owner, they rarely happen consistently.
The fix is specificity. Instead of “review performance regularly”, try: “hold a 20-minute weekly performance review with each manager, agree on one improvement action, and follow it up the following week.” One is an intention. The other is a plan.
Keep it short; one strong lead measure is usually enough, two is the sensible maximum, and three is the absolute limit. More than that, and focus collapses.
When people engage in the right kind of planning, their success rates go up on average between 200 and 300 per cent. Dr Heidi Grant Halvorson
Accountability and making it stick
A Big Rock action plan only works if the actions are owned. That means being clear not just about what will happen, but when, by whom, and how often. Without that structure, even the best-written plan drifts.
The strongest plans are reviewed weekly – not just to check progress, but to learn from what’s working and adjust what isn’t. Over 90 days, that rhythm of action, review, and refinement is what turns a plan into a result.
Before signing off on any plan, it’s worth asking three questions.
- Could someone else read this (within the context that this person works within your business) and know exactly what to do?
- Is this genuinely a behaviour, or just a good intention?
- And if these lead measures were executed consistently for 90 days, would the result almost have to improve?
If the answer to all three is yes, you’ve got a Big Rock! Often, people think action plans begin and end with SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). We often say that there’s no correlation between knowing what SMART goals as a framework mean and being able to write an objective that is considered SMART, let alone deliver upon it!
Going beyond SMART means thinking about how you’ll deliver on those goals, particularly with lead measures in mind. What behaviours or actions are you going to do regularly that you think are going to change the game and help you move your performance forward?
We put this thinking into practice with café-bar and restaurant chain, Loungers, and you can see more about this in this article: Planning with purpose. You can read more about this thinking on the FranklinCovey website: Schedule the Big Rocks, don’t sort gravel.
MMU delivers FranklinCovey’s world-renowned personal effectiveness and leadership development solutions to teams of all sizes. Find out more about how we help you be better than good.
