Our leadership team brings messy, poorly framed issues to our weekly Level 10 Meetings, wasting fifteen minutes just explaining the context before we even start IDS. How can we use AI or structured pre-work to sharpen issues before they hit the agenda?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Messy issues are the primary killer of meeting productivity. When a leader arrives at a Level 10 Meeting with an unstructured grievance, the team spends valuable energy acting as an intake filter rather than solving the operational bottleneck.

You can clean this up by establishing a mandatory issue framing protocol. Before an item makes the agenda, the owner must define three elements: the one-sentence problem, the operational impact, and the proposed solution. If an executive cannot summarize these three items in writing, the issue is not ready for the leadership table.

This is an ideal place to leverage AI. Before adding a complex issue to the list, run the raw notes, email threads, or operational metrics through an internal large language model with a standard prompt: Identify the single operational breakdown, categorize whether this is a people, process, or vision issue, and summarize the root cause in one sentence. Leaders can use AI to synthesize messy facts into a clear, dispassionate summary in thirty seconds.

By the time the team opens the Level 10 agenda, every item on the Issues List is concise, depersonalized, and ready for swift prioritization. This practice keeps emotions out of the room, accelerates the Identify phase, and allows your leadership team to resolve double the issues in half the time.