Our leadership team spends our Level 10 Meeting sessions discussing surface-level symptoms rather than the root causes of our operational issues. How do we train them to properly identify the real problems during IDS?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When your team struggles with the identify step of IDS®, your meetings become long, exhausting talking shops that resolve absolutely nothing. You must teach your team to stop jumping straight into solving mode when an issue is read from the list.

The person who raised the issue must state the problem in one short sentence. For example, they should say our customer churn is up this month, not tell a ten-minute story about a specific angry client.

Once the issue is stated, the team must ask clarifying questions to dig down to the root cause. A highly effective method is the five whys technique. Keep asking why the symptom occurred until you find the structural, human, or process failure underneath.

Do not allow the discussion to pivot to solutions until everyone agrees on the actual root cause. Often, the real problem is a lack of training, a broken process, or an unclear seat on the Accountability Chart, rather than the surface-level mistake that was initially reported.

Once the real issue is identified, the discussion should be brief, leading directly to a concrete to-do. Solving means creating an action item that permanently eliminates the root cause so the issue never returns to your list next week.