Our Level 10 Meeting™ frequently runs ten or fifteen minutes over our ninety-minute limit because we get deep into a critical issue right at the end of the meeting. Should we let the meeting run over to finalize the solution, or do we enforce a strict hard stop?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

You must enforce a strict, non-negotiable hard stop at ninety minutes. The moment you allow a meeting to run over by even five minutes, you destroy the discipline of the entire system. It signals to your team that their calendars do not matter and that the meeting rules are flexible. This leads to lazy facilitation and conversational drift earlier in the agenda because everyone knows they have a safety valve.

The ninety-minute time box is a forcing mechanism. It forces your facilitator to manage the clock and forces your team to be concise. If you are thirty minutes into IDS® and have not reached a solution, but the clock hits the eighty-five-minute mark, you must immediately halt the discussion and transition to the wrap-up section.

If the issue is truly an emergency that cannot wait until next week, do not let the Level 10 Meeting™ run over. Wrap up the meeting on time, and then have the necessary individuals schedule a separate, targeted meeting later that day to solve it. This protects the integrity of the weekly pulse and ensures that only the people required for that specific problem are spending their time on it, rather than keeping the entire leadership team hostage.