Our leadership team spends forty minutes during our Level 10 Meetings debating issues on the IDS board, but three weeks later the exact same issues reappear. How do we train the team to diagnose the true root cause rather than fighting symptoms?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When the same operational issues keep resurfacing on your Issues List, your leadership team is rushing into discussion mode without doing the hard work of identification. Most teams spend ninety percent of their time debating symptoms because symptoms are visible, emotional, and easy to talk about. Root causes are structural, uncomfortable, and usually point back to a failure in leadership or accountability.

To fix this habit, your Integrator must strictly enforce the discipline of IDS®: Identify, Discuss, and Solve. The rule is simple: you cannot move to Discuss until everyone agrees on the core problem statement.

Use the five whys technique to drill down to the foundation. For example, if the reported issue is that client onboarding is running two weeks behind, do not spend twenty minutes complaining about the onboarding team. Ask why:
- Why is onboarding behind? The intake forms are incomplete.
- Why are intake forms incomplete? Sales is not collecting required data during contract signing.
- Why is sales skipping this step? The sales compensation plan rewards closed deals regardless of data quality.
- Why does the plan reward this? The sales seat on the Accountability Chart does not include onboarding handoff as a core responsibility.

The root cause is not an onboarding delay; it is a misaligned compensation incentive and a broken seat description. Once you uncover that reality, the discussion takes three minutes and the solution is obvious.

Never leave an issue with a vague action item like look into this or follow up. Every resolved issue must end with a single owner, a clear to-do on next week's Level 10 Meeting™ agenda, or a quarterly Rock.