PDF Summary:Get Scalable, by Ryan Deiss

As your business grows, you'll quickly discover that the methods that worked when you were small become ineffective at scale. Without the right systems in place, growth can lead to chaos, poor decisions, and burnout. In Get Scalable, Ryan Deiss presents a framework for building what he calls a "Scalable Operating System"—a set of processes, shared language, and goals that allow your business to expand without falling apart.

Deiss explains how to create value engines that map your company's core processes, implement planning systems that break long-term goals into manageable sprints, and establish meeting rhythms that keep your team aligned. You'll learn how to document decision-making frameworks so your team can make smart choices without your constant involvement, and discover how to maintain these systems through regular reviews and updates. This guide offers practical tools for building a business that can grow efficiently while preserving quality and preventing founder exhaustion.

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Value Engines in Non-Traditional Organizations

This framework may not apply to organizations that don’t have customers or don’t need to fulfill customer needs. For example, open-source software projects are often developed by volunteers who collaborate to create and improve software that’s freely available to everyone. These projects don’t have traditional customers or a need to fulfill customer needs. Instead, they create value through collaboration and shared knowledge. The value engines in these projects might focus more on community building, knowledge sharing, and collaborative development rather than growth and fulfillment.

Let’s explore the Planning System and frameworks that can help you document and make decisions.

The Scalable Planning System

Deiss describes the system as a four-part strategy of planning and holding meetings regularly. It consists of planning over three-year periods, implementing in 90-day phases, measuring and reporting in weekly scorecard meetings, and pivoting monthly if needed.

The first step is a "Clarity Day" meeting, a full-day, offsite session for strategic planning. The meeting involves establishing the company’s three-year goal, mission, essential principles, and strategic pillars. After establishing the three-year goal, you can divide it into a dozen 90-day periods. These sprints are divided into roughly twelve weekly metrics phases.

The Effectiveness of the Three-Year, 90-Day, Weekly, and Monthly Cadence

This cadence works because it breaks down a distant three-year goal into a series of short-term commitments. We’re more likely to meet short-term deadlines than long-term ones, so this approach helps us stay on track. The 90-day sprints and weekly metrics phases create a sense of urgency and accountability, making it easier to focus on immediate tasks while still working toward the long-term vision. Monthly pivots allow for flexibility and course correction, ensuring that the company can adapt to changing circumstances without losing sight of its overall objectives. This structure helps align day-to-day activities with the company’s strategic direction, making it more likely that the three-year goal will be achieved.

Documentation & Decision-Making Frameworks

Deiss recommends employing a structured process for decision-making to grow your business. This resource enables your group to make strategic choices just as you would. Your business will grow more quickly when you and your team promptly make correct decisions. However, if you make a lot of poor choices or are too slow in choosing correctly, your company won't survive. If you give all decision-making authority to your staff, it can lead to a buildup of poor choices, causing your company to fail. Conversely, if you retain complete control over decisions, productivity and creativity will falter, exhausting you.

How to Create a Structured Process for Decision-Making

In Simple Rules, Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt suggest that you can create a structured process for decision-making by developing simple rules. These rules distill the experience and priorities of leaders into a handful of concrete, easy-to-remember guidelines tailored to a specific activity, so that people closest to the work can handle similar situations on their own in a consistent way, without having to stop and ask for instructions each time. To create simple rules, pick one recurring decision you usually handle yourself and codify it into a short set of concrete decision rules that your team is explicitly authorized to apply on their own.

Maintaining Momentum: Patterns and Evaluations

To maintain momentum, Deiss suggests establishing a routine of gatherings to make needed modifications. This regular schedule of meetings guarantees that relevant information is delivered to the appropriate people as needed. It enables groups and people to make decisions based on data, guiding the organization in the direction of its objectives. It also reduces the need for impromptu meetings since everyone knows they can raise concerns during the regular meetings.

Deiss advises scheduling the next four Sprint Planning Meetings that occur quarterly, along with Monthly Business Review Meetings and All Hands Meetings. Consult with your leadership group to establish when you'll hold Weekly Scorecard Meetings, and input every meeting date into your company's calendar.

The Impact of Meeting Overload

While meetings are essential for collaboration and decision-making, research shows that excessive or poorly managed meetings can significantly hinder productivity and morale. In The Surprising Science of Meetings, Steven G. Rogelberg highlights that employees spend an average of 23 hours per week in meetings, with 71% of these meetings deemed unproductive. This meeting overload leads to what he calls "meeting recovery syndrome," where employees need time to refocus after each meeting, further reducing overall productivity. Rogelberg suggests that leaders should regularly evaluate the necessity, frequency, and duration of recurring meetings, ensuring each one has a clear purpose and agenda.

Let’s discuss the importance of key artifacts and continuous improvement, along with rhythmic reviews and strategic alignment.

Key Artifacts & Continuous Improvement

According to Deiss, you should regularly update and maintain operational guides so they remain accurate and useful. If you don’t, they’ll become outdated and useless, and your team won’t be able to trust the processes they’re using. He suggests giving someone responsibility for every playbook and scheduling regular three-month reviews and updates. If there are no changes required, that's okay; just make sure to review the playbook.

(Shortform note: While assigning a single owner to each playbook and reviewing every operational guide every three months can help keep your processes up to date, it can also create a bottleneck. If every operational guide has to go through one person, it can slow down the process and make it harder to get things done. It can also lead to a culture of “rubber-stamping,” where people just approve things without really thinking about whether they’re the best way to do things.)

Rhythmic Reviews & Strategic Alignment

Deiss recommends establishing a consistent schedule of meetings to align strategy and review progress. Meetings fall into four categories: planning, review, status update, and one-time. Planning meetings are the most critical and beneficial periods for teams to convene, as this is when they set goals, determine priorities, and approve projects. Planning sessions are generally held every quarter, though certain types might only be necessary annually or biennially. Typically held monthly, review meetings are meant to evaluate the company's progress toward the goals set in planning meetings.

(Shortform note: Quarterly planning meetings and monthly review meetings may not be appropriate for all organizations. For example, in hospital emergency departments, the stakes are high and the environment is constantly changing. In these settings, teams must constantly communicate and adapt to new information. Instead of quarterly planning meetings and monthly review meetings, they rely on near-constant briefings to ensure everyone is on the same page and can respond quickly to changing circumstances.)

They can be anywhere from an hour and a half to a full-day event and are intended to provide leaders with the necessary information and insights to decide whether to adjust the present strategy or maintain the current direction. Check-ins enable quick exchanges of data and ideas. These types of gatherings usually happen every week, and involve Team Scorecard sessions, organization-wide gatherings, and one-on-ones between managers and staff. Though check-in meetings sometimes involve making major decisions, they're mainly meant to promote accountability and exchange information to prepare for a deeper review meeting.

(Shortform note: In Decisive, Chip and Dan Heath argue that we need to create explicit “tripwires” — clear, pre-decided signals or thresholds that will snap us to attention at specific moments and prompt us to pause, review the evidence, and reconsider our course instead of drifting forward on autopilot. For example, you might set a tripwire that says, “If our customer churn rate exceeds 5% in a quarter, we’ll immediately review our retention strategy.” Or, “If a competitor launches a product with a key feature we lack, we’ll immediately assess our product roadmap.” By setting these tripwires in advance, you create a system that forces you to periodically step back and ask, “Is this still the right path?”)

Unplanned meetings are usually unpopular, but if they're conducted effectively, they can be a useful and important means of advancing work. Possible examples are sessions for project kickoff, brainstorming meetings, and what Deiss calls "black swan meetings" (these are meetings necessary when things go awry). The crucial element for the effective use of unscheduled meetings is that, apart from project kickoff meetings, they should occur quite rarely. If you're having many impromptu gatherings, it's typically an indication that the planning sessions didn't go as smoothly as they should have.

Frequent Meetings in High-Reliability Organizations

In Managing the Unexpected, Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe argue that in environments characterized by high uncertainty and tight coupling—such as aircraft carriers, air traffic control centers, nuclear power plants, and emergency rooms—reliable performance depends on people engaging in frequent, brief, face-to-face interactions. These interactions, which include huddles, status updates, and cross-checks, are essential for maintaining a shared understanding of the situation and for making real-time adjustments to plans. In these contexts, frequent impromptu meetings are not a sign of poor planning but rather a hallmark of effective mindful organizing.