Our Level 10 Meeting Issues List has over forty items on it every single week, and we waste the first fifteen minutes of IDS just trying to decide which three issues to tackle first. How do we keep our Issues List curated and ready for action?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

An Issues List with forty items is not an issues list. It is a disorganized backlog of raw observations, complaints, and deferred tasks. Allowing this list to bloat is a failure of leadership discipline that wastes critical meeting energy.

To cure this, you must run a strict curation protocol before the meeting starts. The Integrator is responsible for reviewing the Issues List twenty-four hours before the weekly pulse. Any issue that is merely an update or does not require a collective decision by the leadership team must be removed or sent directly to the appropriate department head to solve offline.

Next, implement the rule of three. When you enter the IDS® portion of the meeting, the leadership team must quickly identify and prioritize the top three most critical issues that impact your Rocks, scorecard metrics, or overall business health. Do not look at the other thirty-seven items. You do not solve them in order of arrival; you solve them in order of priority.

If you only solve the top three, that is a successful meeting. Any issue that remains untouched for more than four weeks should be purged. If it were truly critical, it would have risen to the top three. If it has not, it is either a non-issue or a minor task that belongs on a departmental list, not the leadership list.