We rolled out Level 10 Meetings™ to our departmental teams, but they complain that they do not have enough real issues to fill the ninety minutes and want to shorten the meeting. How do we handle departmental teams that claim they have nothing to IDS®?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a departmental team claims they have no issues to discuss, it is rarely because their department is running flawlessly. More often, it is because they do not know how to identify an issue, or they are hiding operational friction to avoid conflict.

Do not let them shorten the meeting. Doing so validates the false assumption that everything is perfect and destroys the weekly pulse discipline. Instead, use the time to teach them how to dig deeper.

An issue is not just a major crisis. An issue is any obstacle, bottleneck, inefficiency, or idea for improvement that prevents the department from hitting its goals. If their Issues List is empty, the facilitator must look at their departmental Scorecard and Rocks.

If a scorecard metric is red, that is an issue. If a Rock is off track, that is an issue. If every metric is green and every Rock is on track, but the team is working eighty hours a week to make that happen, capacity is the issue.

Use these diagnostic questions to populate their list during the meeting:

- What is the most frustrating part of your daily workflow?
- Where are we dropping the ball on communication with other departments?
- What manual processes are wasting our time every week?

Once they realize that highlighting friction is not a sign of failure but a path to making their jobs easier, their Issues List will fill up, and ninety minutes will suddenly feel short.