---
name: quarterly-alignment
description: "Run the Quarterly Alignment — the 1-Day strategic reset that closes one quarter and sets the next. The deepest Operating System cadence (above weekly-alignment and monthly-alignment): resets the vision, scores the Seed of Life across the quarter, recaps wins/losses + scoreboard + flywheel + core values, reviews the Polaris Star cascade, sets new Quarterly Projects, rebuilds the Problems List, and runs deep Diagnosis + Design + Do. AI-accelerated to ~3 hrs (or a 90-min express). Every section produces a visual; ends by booking the next quarter + monthly reviews into Google Calendar. Use when the user says 'quarterly alignment', 'quarterly review', 'quarterly planning', 'run my quarterly', 'Q1/Q2/Q3/Q4 review', 'end of quarter', 'EOQ review', 'close out the quarter', 'new quarter planning', '1 day quarterly', 'quarterly projects', 'set my projects', 'quarterly reset', 'Polaris Star review', 'reset the vision', or any request to run the quarter-end/start meeting. Should NOT trigger for weekly or monthly cadences."
---

# Quarterly Alignment Skill

## Overview
You are running the **1-Day Quarterly Plan** — the strategic top of the Operating System. The manual version takes a full day (7 hrs). You run an **AI-accelerated** version: you pre-pull and pre-draft everything so the human spends their time deciding and thinking, not gathering. Target ~3 hrs, or a 90-min express.

**Where it sits in the OS hierarchy:**
- **Weekly Alignment** — tactical, every week, 30–60 min — fixes problems, ships actions *(weekly-alignment)*
- **Monthly Alignment** — systems, every month, 60 min–2 hrs — audits patterns, tracks quarter *(monthly-alignment)*
- **Quarterly Alignment** — strategic, every 13 weeks — resets vision, picks new projects *(this skill)*

The quarterly is where you zoom all the way out. The weekly asks "what do I do this week?" The quarterly asks "are we still building the right thing?"

## Component skills — what this meeting runs
The quarterly is the orchestrator at the **strategic** level — it runs every V2 skill in the OS, read across the whole quarter, and it's the one cadence that *resets* them (archives the quarter, sets the next).

| Section | Skill | Quarterly action |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Seed of Life | `seed-of-life` | the quarter **trend** — what's been red all quarter is a standing condition, not a bad week |
| 2. Recap → Scoreboard | `scoreboard` | the quarter by month vs prior quarter; then **New Quarter** (archive + reset for next) |
| 3. Polaris / 4. Projects | `vision` | review the cascade top-down; set the new Projects into it |
| 4. Projects (input) | `golden-section` | a full re-audit — reclaiming the founder's hours is often itself a Project |
| 5. Problems List | `problems-list` | rebuild for the new quarter — carry open, mark solved, re-rank |
| 6. Diagnosis + Design + Do | `problems-list` | Triple-D the top of the hierarchy, take the first action in the room |

Each board persists itself, so the quarterly reads four quarters of accumulated history. The four living documents the OS runs on — **Seed of Life, Scoreboard, Vision, Problems List** — are now all standalone skills; open each as you reach its section.

## The 7 Sections (The 1-Day Quarterly Plan)

```
1. Seed of Life — Quarterly Check-In   → 15 min   (full day: 30)
2. The Quarterly Recap                  → 35 min   (full day: 90)
     → Wins / Losses
     → The Scoreboard
     → The Flywheel
     → Core Values Review
3. The Polaris Star Review              → 25 min   (full day: 60)
4. Create the Quarterly Projects           → 20 min   (full day: 30)
5. Create the Problems List             → 25 min   (full day: 60)
6. Diagnosis + Design + Do              → 45 min   (full day: 120)
7. Conclude (+ book next meetings)      → 15 min   (full day: 30)
                                        ────────
                                  Total: ~3 hrs
```

Don't skip sections — the structure IS the system. The order matters: you ground the person (SOL), give them context (Recap), lift them to the vision (Polaris), set the bets (Projects), surface the friction (Problems), solve the biggest one (D+D+D), then lock it in (Conclude + calendar).

---

## Two non-negotiable upgrades (read these first)

This skill does two things the old paper version can't. **Both are mandatory.**

### 1. Every section gets a visual — the pattern interrupt
A long meeting of staring at numbers kills engagement. Every section produces an **interactive HTML visual** (built with `create_file` → `.html` in `/mnt/user-data/outputs/`, then `present_files`). This keeps the person engaged, makes the data land, and is what makes this a product, not a doc. See `references/visuals-and-calendar.md` for the exact chart type, brand tokens, and code pattern for each section — **read it before Section 1.**

### 2. Book the next meeting before you finish — the recommitment
The meeting isn't done until the next one is in the calendar. At Conclude you use the Google Calendar MCP to book the next quarter's alignment, the 3 monthly reviews, and confirm the weekly recurring. This is what turns a one-off into a system. Full instructions in `references/visuals-and-calendar.md`.

---

## Before Starting — pull everything, draft everything

The whole point of AI-acceleration: the human walks in and reviews, they don't gather. Pull in parallel:

1. **Stripe** — full quarter revenue by month, new customers, MRR change, refunds, BE vs FE split. Pull the *prior* quarter too for QoQ comparison.
2. **Google Calendar** — quarter's meetings/calls booked vs shown; confirm the weekly recurring still exists.
3. **Project knowledge / past chats** — pull all 3 **monthly alignments** for the quarter (`Monthly-Alignment-YYYY-MM`, or legacy `Monthly-Review-YYYY-MM`), the prior **quarterly alignment** snapshot, and the last few **weekly alignments**. These pre-fill Wins/Losses, recurring problems, and pace.
4. **Vision doc** — open the **`vision` skill** dashboard. It holds the Polaris cascade, the 12-month goals (with pace), and the Projects carried from last quarter. This is the working surface for Sections 3 and 4.
5. **Problems List** — open the **`problems-list` skill** and carry over everything still open.

The four living documents the whole OS runs on — **Seed of Life, Scoreboard, Vision Document, Problems List** — are now all standalone V2 skills; open each as its section comes up.

Then pre-draft: Wins/Losses lists, the scoreboard quarter chart, pace against targets, carried-over problems. Walk in with a filled-in meeting. Say so: *"I've pre-pulled the quarter and drafted each section — we're reviewing and deciding, not starting from scratch."*

If a data source is missing, flag it in one line and continue with what you have. Don't block the meeting on a missing pull.

---

### Section 1: Seed of Life — Quarterly Check-In (20 min)

**Run the `seed-of-life` skill** — its trend strip shows the whole quarter at a glance. The weekly does a 5-min SOL pulse; the quarterly goes deeper: score the 7 areas, look at the **trend across the whole quarter**, and ask what's actually moving.

Score each 1-10:

```
Health · Social · Family · Finance · Career · Intellect · Intimacy
(optional 8th: Spiritual)
```

**Visual:** Seed-of-life petal/flower chart with each petal filled to its score, plus a thin sparkline per area showing the quarter trend. (Pattern in the reference file.)

Then the deeper questions — this is the part AI can't do for them:
- Which area moved most this quarter, up or down? Why?
- Which area has been low **all quarter** (showed up red in 2+ monthlies)? That's not a bad week — that's a standing condition. What's the root?
- Growth starts at the individual, not the vision. If a personal area is broken, it will drag the business. Name it before moving on.

Flag anything ≤4 and anything down 2+ from quarter start.

---

### Section 2: The Quarterly Recap (40 min)

Four parts. Pre-draft all of them.

**2a. Wins / Losses (10 min)** — pull from the 3 monthlies. Two columns, business + personal. Then the pattern questions: biggest win and why it worked; the recurring loss (showed up 2+ months = system problem, not bad luck); what surprised you.

**2b. The Scoreboard (15 min)** — **run the `scoreboard` skill**: the full quarter, by month (the monthly Total columns), vs the prior quarter and vs the quarter's targets. At the end of this section hit **New Quarter** to archive the quarter and reset the board for the next.

```
Q[X] [YEAR] SCOREBOARD — by month + QoQ
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
KPI                  M1     M2     M3    QTR     vs PRIOR Q   GRADE
Total Cash           $      $      $     $       [↑↓→ %]      [🟢🟠🔴]
New-Revenue MER*     x      x      x     x       [↑↓→]        [🟢🟠🔴]
Ad Spend             $      $      $     $       [↑↓→ %]      [🟢🟠🔴]
New Customers        #      #      #     #       [↑↓→ %]      [🟢🟠🔴]
FE ROAS              %      %      %     %        [↑↓→]       [🟢🟠🔴]
New Clients          #      #      #     #       [↑↓→]        [🟢🟠🔴]
Close Rate           %      %      %     %        [↑↓→]       [🟢🟠🔴]
BE Cash              $      $      $     $       [↑↓→ %]      [🟢🟠🔴]
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
```
\*Recurring-revenue businesses: split **New-Revenue MER** (cash from clients won this period ÷ ad spend) from **Trailing Revenue** (cash from prior-period clients). Blended MER lies. Show CAC Payback too.

**Visual:** scoreboard dashboard — cash-by-month bars, MER/ROAS lines, traffic-light KPI grid. Call out the biggest mover, anything that flipped colour, anything red 2+ months.

**2c. The Flywheel (8 min)** — the quarterly engine review. The Primary Flywheel is **Marketing → Sales → Fulfilment**, with **Operations & Finance as accelerators** once the loop is consistent (~$50K/m): prove it spins, then speed it up / add volume / scale. Grade each spoke with the quarter's scoreboard data, name the slowest spoke (that's the constraint capping the whole loop), and run the two Jim Collins gut-checks: (1) did we push the *same* loop consistently, or chase shiny objects? (2) did the founder's hours go into product + marketing (the result-producers) or into ops + admin (costs)? **Read `references/the-flywheel.md` for the full model, the Collins/Drucker framing, and the exact run order — this is the part to anchor in the system.** Visual: 3-spoke flywheel, each node colour-graded, Ops & Finance as outer accelerator arrows, with a "the constraint this quarter is ___" callout.

**2d. Core Values Review (7 min)** — review your business's core values: the handful of principles you hire, fire, and decide by. (Haven't defined them yet? Draft them here — they're what keep a growing team aligned.) For each: did we live it this quarter? Where did we slip? The big one to test against the quarter: *did we chase bright shiny objects, or did we do what the data told us?*

---

### Section 3: The Polaris Star Review (30 min)

The Polaris Star is the long-term vision cascade — 100-year → 25-year → 3-year → 12-month — that everything below ladders up to. **Work directly in the `vision` skill dashboard** — it holds the cascade and each level's status. Review **top-down**.

```
🌀 100-Year Vision
🌞 25-Year Plan
🌐 3-Year Mission
🔥 12-Month Mission + Goals
```

For each level ask: **is this still true?** Tap its status pill to mark On track / Needs reset / Off track and edit the text live. A quarter is long enough that the 12-month goals often need adjusting and occasionally the 3-year does. The 25/100 should be stable — if they're moving, that's a real signal worth sitting with.

The critical check: **do this quarter's results and next quarter's plan actually ladder up to the 12-month goals?** The dashboard's 12-Month Goals section shows live pace bars (current ÷ target) — update the current numbers from the scoreboard. If you're 2 quarters in and tracking 20% to an annual target, either the plan changes or the target does. Don't carry a dead goal — mark it Reset and fix it here, now.

The edits persist, so the weekly and monthly Mission Review read the same cascade you set here. **Visual is the dashboard itself** — the cascade with status pills + the pace bars.

---

### Section 4: Create the Quarterly Projects (25 min)

Projects = the 3-6 big projects that define the next quarter. **Growth lives in projects, not tasks.** Tasks maintain; projects move the vision. This section is where you choose what actually moves — and you commit them **into the `vision` skill dashboard**, so they persist and show up as last-quarter's projects at the next meeting.

First, in the dashboard, grade the *prior* quarter's projects: set each to **Done / Partial / Dropped**. Carry forward only what still matters — don't auto-carry. Then add the new projects ("+ commit a project"). Each project captures:
```
PROJECT: [Name]
  → Why it matters: [which 12-month goal / bottleneck it serves]
  → Definition of done: [the observable outcome — not "work on X"]
  → Owner: [who]
  → The one metric that proves it moved: [number]
```

Rules:
- **Max 6, ideally 3-5.** More projects = no projects. A solo operator should rarely run more than 4.
- Every project ladders to a 12-month goal (Section 3) or kills the #1 bottleneck (Sections 5/6). If it does neither, cut it.
- **Run the `golden-section` skill.** This is the quarterly moment to review it: which tasks are draining energy / below your pay grade, and which should become a project to *systemise, delegate, automate, or eliminate*? Reclaiming the founder's hours is often itself a project.

**Visual is the dashboard itself** — the Projects render as cards (name, why, definition-of-done, owner, metric, status) right inside the Vision Document, next to the goals they ladder up to.

---

### Section 5: Create the Problems List (30 min)

This rebuilds the Problems List for the new quarter using the **`problems-list` skill**. It replaces the Google Sheet — it persists across sessions, scores each problem 0–10 and auto-ranks by severity, and exports to markdown/PDF for the record.

How to run it:
1. **Open the `problems-list` skill.** It auto-loads any saved problems from previous sessions.
2. **Carry over** every still-open problem from the prior quarter + the monthlies. Mark anything resolved as Solved (it moves to the collapsed Solved log — proof of progress).
3. **Add new problems.** For each, capture: severity 0–10 (10 = bleeding-neck), Triple-D stage (Define/Diagnose/Design/Testing), root cause, the linked metric, and a proposed test/solution. State problems as **facts, not complaints** ("FE ROAS is 79%, below 125% target" not "ads aren't working").
4. **Sort by severity.** The dashboard does this automatically and graphs the severity distribution + problems-by-pillar so the heaviest area is obvious.

The #1 problem (highest severity) feeds straight into Section 6.

See `references/living-documents.md` for how the dashboard, the markdown snapshot, and project knowledge fit together.

---

### Section 6: Diagnosis + Design + Do (60 min)

The core of the meeting. Take the top 1-3 problems and run the **Triple-D** — for the quarterly, add **Do** (an actual first action taken or scheduled in the room, not just assigned).

```
PROBLEM: [Statement — fact form]

DEFINE
  → What's happening: [observable facts]
  → What should be happening: [the standard / target]
  → The gap: [measured]

DIAGNOSE
  → Surface cause: [what it looks like]
  → Root cause: [what's actually driving it — keep asking "why"]
  → Evidence: [data that confirms the root cause]

DESIGN
  → The test/fix: [specific system change to remove the root cause]
  → Success metric: [how we'll know it worked]
  → Timeline: [when we expect signal]

DO
  → First action taken NOW or booked: [the smallest thing that starts it today]
  → Actions: □ [action] — [owner] — [due]
```

Spend 80% of the time on the #1 problem. One problem solved deep beats five touched lightly. Bring the frameworks to the diagnosis: revenue → 26 Keys; marketing → LeadFLOW / Engine of Ad Results; sales → 5 Sections / 5 Objections; ops → Golden Section / 4 Tiers of Task; mindset → Seed of Life. **Visual:** a Triple-D card per problem worked.

---

### Section 7: Conclude — assign outcomes, rate, BOOK THE NEXT MEETINGS (20 min)

```
Q[X+1] — THE QUARTER AHEAD
─────────────────────────────────
#1 Focus (one sentence):  [the single thing]
The Projects:                [from Section 4]
Top problems being solved:[from Section 6]
One word for the quarter: [Build / Sell / Systemise / Polish...]

Outcomes assigned:
  □ [outcome] — [owner] — [due]

MEETING RATING (1-10):    [ask]
```

**Then — before you end — book the next meetings via Google Calendar MCP.** This is mandatory; the meeting is not complete without it. Book:
1. **Next Quarterly Alignment** — ~13 weeks out, a morning half-day block.
2. **The 3 Monthly Alignments** for the coming quarter — last/first day of each month.
3. **Confirm the weekly recurring alignment** exists (Mon 10:00); create it if missing.

Exact MCP steps, event titles, and timing defaults are in `references/visuals-and-calendar.md`. After booking, confirm in one line: *"Booked: Q[X+1] alignment [date], 3 monthly reviews, weekly recurring confirmed."*

---

## Output — the snapshot + auto-save (always produce this)

After the meeting, write the snapshot to `/mnt/user-data/outputs/Quarterly-Alignment-YYYY-QX.md` and `present_files` it. Structure: SOL trend → Recap (wins/losses, scoreboard, flywheel, core values) → Polaris status → the Projects → top problems + Triple-D → the quarter-ahead block → ratings.

**Then auto-file it — don't make the user double-handle.** At Conclude, ask once: *"Want me to file this to your Drive Operations folder?"* On yes, use the Google Drive MCP (`tool_search` → `Google Drive:create_file`) to write the `.md` straight into your Drive Operations folder. No download, no re-upload. Confirm in one line with the Drive link. Future meetings retrieve it via Drive search, so the work compounds without any manual step.

Project knowledge is optional and manual — the only thing that can't be automated (it's a UI action). Mention it only if the user wants the snapshot in-context for the AI; otherwise Drive auto-save + Drive search covers compounding. The living dashboards (Problems List, scoreboard) persist themselves via `window.storage` and need no save step. See `references/living-documents.md`.

---

## Express Version (90 min)

When the full day isn't available:
```
1. SOL scores + the one area that's been red all quarter   → 10 min
2. Scoreboard (quarter vs prior, biggest movers only)       → 15 min
3. Polaris: are the 12-month goals still true + on pace?    → 10 min
4. Projects: grade old, set new (max 4)                        → 20 min
5. Problems list: carry over + top 3 new                    → 10 min
6. #1 problem → Triple-D + Do                               → 20 min
7. Conclude + BOOK NEXT MEETINGS                            →  5 min
```
Visuals still appear (they're fast). The calendar booking still happens (non-negotiable).

---

## Key Principles
- **Strategic, not tactical.** The weekly fixes this week. The quarterly decides what's worth doing at all. Stay zoomed out.
- **Growth is in projects, not tasks.** Projects move the vision; tasks just keep the lights on. Protect project time.
- **Kill dead goals out loud.** A 12-month goal you're 20% to at the halfway mark is a decision, not a disappointment. Reset it or recommit — don't drift.
- **The individual comes before the vision.** A founder running on a broken personal area won't build. SOL first, every time.
- **The file IS the system.** No snapshot in project knowledge = no compounding = it was a chat, not a review.
- **The meeting ends in the calendar.** Recommitment is booked, not intended.
- **Every section gets a visual.** Engagement is the product. A meeting nobody finishes teaches nothing.
