Our Level 10 Issues List has accumulated over thirty items that we never get to, and seeing the massive backlog every week is draining team morale. How do we groom and clean up the list without ignoring genuine problems?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A bloated Issues List is not a sign of operational transparency; it is a sign of avoidance. When an Issues List carries 30 or 40 items week after week, leaders stop taking the list seriously because they know the bottom half will never be addressed. It turns into an operational junk drawer.

To restore traction, run a disciplined Issues List cleanup during your next quarterly pulse, or take the first 15 minutes of your weekly IDS to execute a purge.

Use three strict filters to eliminate the bloat:

First, apply the 30-day relevance test. If an issue has sat on the list for a month without being prioritized in the top three, it is clearly not an urgent threat to your quarterly Rocks or Scorecard. Kill it. If it is truly important, it will surface again when the pain is real.

Second, reassign items that belong elsewhere. Many items on executive lists are not leadership team issues at all. They belong to a specific department or a single seat. Delegate them directly to the appropriate leader to solve within their departmental Level 10 Meeting or individual 1-on-1s.

Third, identify items that are actually strategic ideas. If an issue is a massive, multi-quarter initiative like expanding into a new territory, move it to the V/TO Long-Term Issues List for evaluation during your Annual Planning session.

Keep your weekly Level 10 Issues List lean, ideally between five and fifteen highly relevant items. When the list is manageable, the team attacks it with urgency instead of defeatism.