We have been running EOS® for over eighteen months, and while our weekly Level 10 Meeting™ starts and ends on time, the IDS® portion has become dry and mechanical with no breakthrough discussions. How do we inject energy back into the meeting and get our team solving real, structural issues again?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When your Level 10 Meeting™ starts to feel mechanical, it is usually because your team has slipped into a routine of reporting rather than problem-solving. The weekly meeting is designed to keep your team aligned, but its real power lies in the IDS® portion. If you are rushing through IDS® or avoiding the real, painful issues, the meeting loses its value.

To inject energy back into your Level 10 Meeting™, you must first clean up your weekly Scorecard. If your metrics are always green, your targets are too easy or you are tracking the wrong things. Raise the bar on your metrics to expose the operational cracks. This will naturally generate real issues for your IDS® list.

Second, change how you run the IDS® portion. Stop accepting polite, superficial issues. If someone raises an issue, push them to identify the root cause. Ask the hard questions that people are avoiding. Is a core process failing? Is there a people issue on the Accountability Chart™?

Make it a rule that the team must spend at least sixty minutes of the ninety-minute meeting on IDS®. By ruthlessly protecting this time and refusing to allow updates to turn into dry status reports, you will keep your team engaged in solving high-impact operational problems that move the business forward.