Our Level 10 Meeting is routinely bleeding past the ninety-minute mark and turning into a status update; how do we get it back under control?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A Level 10 Meeting™ that bleeds past ninety minutes is not a meetings problem; it is a discipline problem. When your meeting drags, it is almost always because you are violating the core rule of the agenda: you are discussing items during the reporting phase instead of saving them for the Identify, Discuss, and Solve phase, known as IDS®.

To fix this immediately, your meeting leader must enforce a strict, time-boxed rhythm. The first twenty-five minutes are for reporting only.
- Good news takes five minutes.
- Scorecard review takes five minutes.
- Rock review takes five minutes.
- Customer and employee headlines take five minutes.
- To-do list review takes five minutes.

During these reviews, there is absolutely no discussion allowed. If an item is off track, the only acceptable response is to drop it to the Issues List. Do not explain why it is late or how you plan to fix it yet.

This leaves you with a full sixty minutes for IDS®. If you find your team telling stories instead of identifying issues, the facilitator must step in. Interrupt the storyteller politely and ask what the specific issue is. By keeping the reporting phase to a strict twenty-five minutes, you protect the integrity of the meeting and ensure you actually solve issues rather than just talking about them.