What a QBR is for, what belongs in it, and why most of them are a monthly review with a longer deck.
Most quarterly business reviews are a monthly review with three months of numbers in it and a longer deck.
That is the failure. If the quarterly asks the same question as the monthly — how did we do against plan — then it is the monthly, run less often, with more slides. The quarter is the only forum in the operating rhythm that can ask a different question, and wasting it is expensive.
A rhythm that works has each meeting asking something the others cannot.
If your quarterly is reviewing the monthly's actions, you have one meeting happening twice and no forum asking the third question at all.
Performance, briefly, and only as evidence. The quarter's numbers matter in a QBR because of what they tell you about whether the strategy is working — not for their own sake. Fifteen minutes, on one page, and nobody walks through it line by line because everyone read it.
Progress against the small number of things that actually matter. Most businesses have five or six strategic priorities and thirty initiatives. The QBR is about the five or six. If an initiative is not traceable to one of them, the interesting question is why it is being resourced.
What we have learned. The single most-skipped section, and the one that justifies the meeting. What did we believe three months ago that we no longer believe? Markets move, assumptions turn out wrong, a competitor does something. A QBR that never changes its mind about anything is not reviewing the business, it is reporting on it.
What we are stopping. A quarterly that only ever adds is a quarterly that is building a portfolio nobody can deliver. The stop list is the hardest agenda item to run and the one that most improves the next quarter.
Next quarter's commitments, with owners and a way of telling whether they happened. Three to five. A list of twelve is a list nobody will be held to.
A QBR that works is decided before the room. The pack goes out three to five working days ahead, people read it, and the meeting starts from "we have all read this" rather than "let me take you through it".
That requires two unpopular things.
First, the pack has to be finished early, which means the numbers have to close early, which is usually the real constraint and worth fixing.
Second, the chair has to be willing to stop someone presenting content the room has read. Once. After that, nobody does it.
The pay-off is that a two-hour meeting spends ninety minutes on judgement instead of twenty. That difference is the entire value of the forum.
A QBR produces three things, and if it produces fewer it did not happen:
The last one is what makes the cadence a cadence rather than a series of meetings. If the next QBR does not start by looking at what this one committed to, the commitments were decoration and everyone learns that within two cycles.
The [Quarterly Business Review System](/products/quarterly-business-review-system.html) is the workbook and the deck — scorecard, priorities, commitments, the learned-and-stopping sections — with a complete worked example of a business having an honest quarter. £45. It is also in [The Operating Cadence Pack](/products/the-operating-cadence-pack.html) at £79 with five others.