Our Level 10 Meeting Issues List has ballooned to forty items, and our team feels demoralized because we only solve two or three each week. How do we clean up and curate the Issues List so IDS tackles what truly matters?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A bloated Issues List is a symptom of two failures: treating the Level 10 Meeting as an administrative to-do list, and refusing to push minor issues back to individual seats.

To regain control, conduct a hard reset of your Issues List during your next meeting. Filter every item through three operational rules:

First, remove individual to-do items. If an issue is simply a task that belongs to a specific seat on the Accountability Chart, assign it directly to that owner as a seven-day To-Do. It does not belong on the leadership team Issues List.

Second, push departmental issues down. If an issue affects only the sales team or only customer service, remove it from the senior leadership agenda. It must be solved inside that department Level 10 Meeting, not by the executive team.

Third, ruthlessly identify the top three. When you enter IDS, never work from the top of the list down. The Integrator asks the team to select the top three most critical issues facing the business this week. Rank them one, two, and three.

Begin IDS on issue number one. Do not look at issue number two until number one is completely identified, discussed, and solved with clear action steps assigned to specific owners. If you only solve two issues in sixty minutes, but those two were your greatest structural bottlenecks, the meeting was a massive success.

Erase low-value issues that have sat on the list for more than thirty days. If an issue has sat idle for a month without impacting revenue, customers, or culture, it was never a real issue. It was noise.