Our leadership team members rarely add anything to the Issues List before our Level 10 Meeting starts, but then they suddenly remember ten different operational fires during the meeting itself, which completely derails our prioritization. How do we enforce a culture of real-time issues submission?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

An empty Issues List at the start of a Level 10 Meeting™ followed by a flood of spontaneous, late-breaking fires is a sign of reactive management. When leaders wait until the meeting to think about their issues, they waste valuable time prioritizing on the fly. To correct this, you must build a culture of real-time issues submission. First, establish a rule that the Issues List is an ongoing, living document. Leaders should add issues to the list the moment they encounter them during the week, rather than waiting for the meeting. Second, set a hard cutoff. The Issues List is locked ten minutes before the meeting starts. Any issue that is not on the list before the cutoff cannot be discussed this week, unless it is a genuine, business-ending emergency. Third, if the list is empty when the meeting starts, the facilitator should not accept it. Spend the first two minutes of the meeting doing a silent generation exercise where everyone writes down their top issues. Once your team experiences the pain of having their late issues pushed to the following week, they will quickly adapt and start entering their issues into the system as they occur.