Our leadership team spends most of our Level 10 Meetings debating symptoms instead of resolving actual problems. How do we get better at the Identify step of IDS® to find the real issue?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Identify is the hardest part of IDS® (Identify, Discuss, Solve). Most leadership teams suffer from solving the same issues repeatedly because they address the surface symptom rather than the root cause. This happens because humans naturally prefer to discuss comfortable, operational friction points rather than uncomfortable, systemic people or process problems.

To get to the issue behind the issue, you must run a rigorous, unsentimental interrogation of every item on your Issues List. When a team member brings up an issue, do not let them launch into a story. Instead, ask them to define the issue in a single, concise sentence. Force them to name names and identify the specific business impact. Ask why at least three to five times to dig past the symptoms. For example, if the stated issue is that marketing reports are always late, the root cause is rarely laziness. It is usually that the marketing director does not have the capacity, has a conative mismatch with the role, or lacks the necessary data from another department.

Do not move to the Discuss step until the entire leadership team agrees on the real problem. If you start discussing solutions before identifying the true obstacle, you are wasting time curing the cough instead of treating the disease. Use this discipline in every Level 10 Meeting™ to build a healthy, high-functioning team that values truth over comfort.