We have been running on EOS for more than a year and our weekly Level 10 Meetings have become stale and repetitive. How do we inject fresh energy into these meetings and keep them from turning into status reports?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Meeting decay happens when a leadership team stops being completely honest during the IDS portion of the agenda. If your Level 10 Meetings feel stale, it is because you are avoiding the real, uncomfortable issues and instead discussing safe, administrative topics. To revitalize your meetings, you must enforce the discipline of the agenda with absolute rigidity. First, audit your Issues List. If a topic has been sitting on the list for more than two weeks, or if it is just an announcement, delete it immediately. The Issues List is only for items that require a decision, a plan, or a solution. Second, during the IDS portion, do not let people tell long stories or give updates. Force the issue owner to state the problem in one sentence, identify the root cause, and immediately move to solve. Third, rotate the facilitator role among different members of the leadership team. This prevents any single person from carrying the energy of the room and forces everyone to take ownership of the meeting flow. Most importantly, bring the elephant in the room to the table. If your Level 10 Meetings do not occasionally feel slightly tense because you are tackling hard interpersonal or strategic friction, you are not actually IDSing. Keep the meetings focused, fast-paced, and strictly limited to eighty minutes.