Every time a sudden customer issue or sales fire pops up on the morning of our Level 10 Meeting™, our team wants to scrap the standard scorecard and Rock reviews to spend the entire ninety minutes talking about that one crisis. How do we hold the line?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a crisis hits, the natural human reaction is to drop everything and talk about it. But scrapping your Level 10 Meeting™ agenda to focus entirely on a sudden fire is a recipe for operational chaos. If you skip your scorecard and Rock reviews, you lose visibility into the rest of the business, and you will inevitably miss other developing crises. The discipline of the Meeting Pulse is what keeps your company stable during turbulent times. To handle a sudden emergency, you must trust the system. Do not modify the agenda. Start the meeting on time, run through the segue, the scorecard, the Rock review, the customer headlines, and the to-do list in the exact time allotted. This should take exactly twenty-five minutes. When you reach the IDS® portion of the meeting, that is when you address the crisis. Put the emergency at the very top of your Issues List as priority number one. You now have a full hour of focused, structured time to identify the root cause, discuss solutions, and assign clear action steps. By sticking to the agenda, you ensure that you do not drop other critical balls while solving the crisis of the day. If you cannot solve the emergency within that hour, assign a dedicated to-do for a sub-group to meet offline. Never let a single operational fire burn down your weekly discipline.