Our Level 10 Issues List has accumulated over sixty items, creating overwhelm and analysis paralysis when we try to select our top three priorities for IDS. How do you purge and organize a massive backlog without losing legitimate business problems?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A bloated Issues List is not a badge of thoroughness; it is an organizational junk drawer. When a leadership team stares at sixty unranked items every week, decision fatigue sets in before IDS even begins. Teams end up picking easy tactical items rather than attacking structural bottlenecks.

To clear the clutter and restore focus, run a mechanical triage exercise.

First, schedule a one-time thirty-minute purge outside the Level 10 Meeting, or use the first half of a Quarterly Planning session. Move through every item on the backlog with three strict options: Keep, Kill, or Transfer.

- Kill: Any item older than thirty days that has not caused an operational breakdown is a phantom issue. Delete it. If it is genuinely critical, it will resurface naturally.
- Transfer: Items that belong to a single department must be pushed down to that department's Level 10 Issues List. If an issue does not require cross-functional leadership debate, it has no business sitting on the executive board.
- Keep: High-impact structural issues that directly affect your V/TO, core processes, company scorecard, or quarterly Rocks.

Second, enforce a hard cap of twenty active issues on the leadership list going forward. If a leader wants to add a twenty-first item, they must identify an existing item to remove or merge. This forces leaders to self-filter before dumping low-level grievances onto the company pulse.