The Problem with 90-Day Rocks in a 9-Day World

Recently our community had a pretty heated debate about EOS – specifically, whether the Entrepreneurial Operating System is still the right framework for running a professional services firm in 2026.

The critics had a clear complaint: EOS’s 90-day “rocks” create a planning cadence that’s simply too slow for the environment we’re operating in right now. By the time you’ve locked in your quarterly priorities, three of them are already obsolete and two new ones have appeared that you couldn’t have anticipated.

The world just moves faster than the framework.

I think the critics are right, but the underlying question EOS was designed to answer – how do I create enough structure to run this firm without it falling apart – remains. We just need a better answer to it for 2026.

That answer, in my experience, is Agile.

Not Agile as a buzzword. Not the sprint board your dev team uses.

Agile as an actual operating method – one built from the beginning for environments where the plan will change before the ink is dry.

The firms I’ve seen handle this moment best aren’t the ones that abandoned structure for flexibility, or doubled down on rigid planning in defiance of the chaos. They’re the ones that found a third option: lightweight, visible, iterative operating infrastructure that creates focus and flexibility at the same time.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Agile is not what you think it is

When most people hear “Agile,” one of two things happens. Either they picture their software development team’s sprint board and wonder what that has to do with running a consulting firm. Or they think of it as a synonym for “fast” or “flexible” – a vibe more than a method. Move quickly. Stay responsive. Iterate.

Both of these are understandable misreadings, and both miss the point.

Agile, done right, is an operating system. It’s a set of specific, lightweight practices that give teams the structure to make good decisions about what to work on, to see clearly who’s doing what, and to finish something before piling on new things.

The reason it produces flexibility is precisely because it’s rigorous – not despite that rigor.

A recent HBR study of banks and healthcare firms found that the organizations that sustained competitive advantage over time weren’t the ones that reacted fastest. They were the ones that had built cumulative operational capabilities – each layer enabling the next – that allowed them to learn faster than their competitors. The study was focused on large enterprises, but the underlying logic applies at any scale: responsiveness without infrastructure is just thrash.

For a $10M professional services firm, that infrastructure doesn’t need to be complicated. It just needs to have three things.

Number one: The backlog, a home for every idea that isn’t “right now”

Here’s a scenario that might feel familiar: A founder has a Brilliant Idea – a new service offering, a partnership worth exploring, a change to how the team operates. They’re excited about it. They share it with the team at the next meeting. Everybody drops what they were doing and works on the new Brilliant Idea.

A week or two later, the founder wonders what happened to the project that got started at the beginning of the quarter. Everybody says it’s on hold, because they’re all working on the new Brilliant Idea.

A week or so later, Brilliant Idea #2 comes along, and the cycle repeats. By the end of the quarter, mysteriously, none of the efforts are done. Not because nobody worked hard enough, but because there was no focus.

A backlog solves this problem. It’s not where work goes to die; it’s a running, prioritized list of everything the organization wants to do, but isn’t doing right now.

Ideas go in when they surface, but they don’t get started on right away (yes, even founder’s Brilliant Ideas). They get evaluated against everything else, and only launched when there’s capacity to act on them and they’re really the top priority.

In the meantime, nothing gets lost, but nothing gets acted on impulsively either.

The backlog is not a to-do list; it’s a decision-making tool. Having it means your team can trust that good ideas won’t disappear if they don’t get acted on immediately.

And it means you have a place to put all that C54 inspiration without it immediately disrupting someone’s week.

Number two: Visual work management, knowing what your team is doing without the meeting tax

Ask most founders how they keep track of what their team is working on, and the honest answer is: a combination of memory, meetings, and late night text messages to their team when they suddenly remember a languishing project.

This is not a character flaw. It’s an infrastructure problem.

When work isn’t visible, the only way to track it is through conversation, which means check-ins, status meetings, and the constant low-grade anxiety of wondering whether the right things are getting done.

Visual work management is the antidote. It can be as simple as a shared board – physical or digital – where every active piece of work has a card that moves through columns (To Do, In Progress, Done). Everyone on the team can see what’s in flight. The founder can get a status update in 30 seconds without scheduling anything.

This sounds almost insultingly simple. And it kind of is. But the impact is not simple at all.

When work is visible, conversations shift from spending 60 minutes with your whole team answering, “where are we on these projects?” to a 15-minute daily check-in that’s more like, “I notice we have six things in progress – this is the one we need to focus on today” That is a fundamentally different and more useful conversation.

You’ll be thankful for fewer status meetings, and your team will be thankful for fewer late night texts.

Number three: WIP limits, the mechanism that makes focus stick

Work In Progress limits – WIP limits – are the Agile practice most people have never heard of and most need. The concept is straightforward: you set a maximum number of things that can be in progress at any given time, for a team or for an individual, and you hold to it.

If your limit is five active projects and you’re at five, nothing new starts until something finishes. That’s it. That’s the rule.

It sounds rigid. It is rigid. That’s the point.

In our research at AgileSherpas – we’ve been running the State of Agile Marketing Report for nine years – too much work in progress is consistently the number one obstacle that gets in the way of teams working effectively.

Not lack of talent. Not unclear strategy. Too many things in flight simultaneously. And the teams that are most successful aren’t the ones that work harder. They’re the ones that work on fewer things at once.

For founders specifically, WIP limits do something important: they create a forcing function against shiny object syndrome, an affliction from which we all suffer.

Something new and exciting appears – a prospect, a partnership, a pivot – and suddenly it’s on the active pile alongside everything else. WIP limits don’t prevent you from pursuing new opportunities. They require you to make an explicit trade-off when you do.

Something goes on the backlog. Something gets finished first. The new thing has to earn its place.

The HBR research I mentioned earlier found that firms building capabilities sequentially – completing each layer before adding the next – dramatically outperformed those piling on new initiatives without finishing old ones.

WIP limits are, at the team level, exactly this principle in practice across a group of people. Stop starting. Start finishing. Find out what actually works before you blindly invest more resources into something new.

The counterintuitive result

Here’s what I’ve watched happen when professional services firms put Agile practices in place: they get more responsive, not less.

Because the backlog catches ideas before they become interruptions, the team can actually concentrate on what’s in front of them.

Because work is visible, the founder spends less time in status conversations and more time on the things only they can do.

Because WIP limits enforce finishing, the firm generates real signal – things actually launch, results actually come in, and decisions about what to do next are based on data rather than enthusiasm.

You can’t attend every C54 webinar.

You can’t chase every opportunity your market throws at you.

You shouldn’t try.

The founders and firms that will thrive in 2026 aren’t the ones saying yes to everything; they’re the ones who have built the operating infrastructure to make faster, clearer, lower-regret decisions about what gets their attention.

Focus and flexibility aren’t opposites. The right system gives you both.