We have cascaded Level 10 Meetings™ to our frontline operations department, but their weekly sessions are running sixty minutes instead of ninety because they claim they have no issues to IDS®. How do we teach a departmental team to identify and raise hidden issues instead of just reporting that everything is fine?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a departmental Level 10 Meeting™ consistently ends early because the team claims they have no issues to solve, it is a major red flag. It usually means the team does not understand what an issue actually is, or they are hiding problems to avoid conflict.

An issue is not just a crisis or a failure. Any obstacle, opportunity, metric variance, or system inefficiency that stands in the way of achieving the department's goals is an issue. To get the team identifying these points, start with their scorecard. If a metric is red, that is automatically an issue. If a project is off track, that is an issue.

The facilitator must also become an active miner of conflict. During the meeting, ask direct, probing questions. Ask what is taking the team too long to complete, where they are experiencing friction with other departments, or what repetitive questions they are answering for clients.

Finally, tie this weekly pulse to your exit readiness and process documentation efforts. If you are using the Step by Step Exit model, any gap in tribal knowledge or undocumented workflow is an issue. Use the departmental meeting to identify these operational dependencies and assign weekly To-Dos to write down those procedures. Once the team learns that raising issues is how they make their own jobs easier, the list will fill up quickly.