During our weekly IDS sessions, our team keeps resolving issues by deciding to "monitor the situation" or "keep an eye on it," which means the exact same issue keeps appearing on our list week after week. How do we ban this lazy decision-making?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Deciding to monitor an issue is not a solution; it is an active postponement of a decision born out of fear or laziness. When you allow your team to walk away from IDS with monitor as their action item, you are tolerating meeting waste and dragging down your execution. Every issue on your list must be solved completely and permanently.

To break this habit, the facilitator must establish a strict rule: monitor is no longer an acceptable verb for a Level 10 Meeting to-do. Every single to-do generated during IDS must be a specific, actionable task assigned to one owner that can be fully completed by the next weekly meeting.

When someone proposes monitoring as a solution, the facilitator must ask: What are we actually waiting for? If you need more data, the to-do is to gather that specific data by next week so a decision can be made. If you are waiting for an external event, the to-do is to set a hard deadline for when we will take action.

By forcing the team to define a concrete action, you push past the fear of making a wrong decision. As Teddy Roosevelt said, the worst thing you can do is nothing. If a decision turns out to be wrong, you will see it quickly on your Scorecard and adjust. But sitting in limbo under the guise of monitoring is killing your momentum. Solve it, assign it, and move on.