During our IDS® sessions, my team is incredibly polite and spends forty-five minutes discussing process breakdowns when the real issue is a personnel bottleneck or a conative mismatch. How do we strip away the corporate niceties and quickly identify the root issue?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Polite teams are expensive teams. When your leadership team spends forty-five minutes discussing a minor process breakdown, they are usually hiding a deeper, more sensitive issue. To get to the root of the problem during IDS®, you must practice radical candor and ask better diagnostic questions. When an issue is raised, do not let your team jump straight to solving it. Spend the majority of your time on the identify step. Ask the owner of the issue to define the problem in one clear sentence that includes a specific name and a specific impact on the business. If the team is dancing around a personnel problem, the Integrator must step in and ask direct questions. Is this a process issue, or is this a GWC™ issue? Does the person in this seat truly have the capacity to do this job? Often, what looks like a broken process is actually a person who is drowning because they lack the conative drive or cognitive capacity for their role. Stop accepting surface-level explanations. Force your team to name the human or structural bottleneck behind the operational symptom. Once you identify the real issue, solving it usually takes less than five minutes.