If we solve our top issues and find ourselves with thirty minutes left in our scheduled Level 10 Meeting, should we end early or are we failing to dig deep enough?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

If your team finishes solving its top issues early, your immediate instinct might be to end the Level 10 Meeting™ and give thirty minutes back to everyone. While this can feel like a win, it is often a missed opportunity. Before you close the meeting, the facilitator should check the remaining issues on the list, even the low-priority ones. If the list is truly empty, use that extra time to do a deep dive into your Scorecard trends, review the progress of your long-term Rocks, or discuss strategic opportunities that could accelerate your path to a clean exit. However, if there are genuinely no issues and the business is running perfectly, you can end the meeting early. But treat this as the exception, not the rule. If you are regularly finishing thirty minutes early, it is highly likely that your team is avoiding the messy, complex root-cause problems that actually require deep debate. Use the full ninety minutes to push the business forward and build a highly disciplined operation.