During our Level 10 Meetings, our team spends forty minutes debating an issue only to end up treating the surface symptoms rather than the root cause. How do we run the Identify step in IDS so we stop solving the same problems over and over?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Most leadership teams rush through the Identify step of IDS because they are anxious to start debating and fixing things. As a result, they spend forty minutes arguing about a symptom, agree on a superficial action item, and then find the exact same problem back on their Issues List three weeks later.

The first rule of IDS is that the stated issue is almost never the real issue. When someone drops a topic onto the list, such as customer onboarding is broken, that is a symptom, not a root cause. Before you allow anyone to propose a solution, the person who raised the issue must state the core problem in a single, clear sentence.

To peel back the layers, use the five whys technique. If customer onboarding is slow, ask why. Because engineering did not provision the accounts. Why did engineering not provision the accounts? Because they never received the handoff document from sales. Why did they not receive the document? Because sales has no standard operating procedure for post-close handoffs.

Now you have found the real issue. You are not fixing a broad onboarding problem; you are writing a sales-to-engineering handoff checklist. Notice how the problem shifted from an interdepartmental feud to a missing process tool.

Never move to Discuss until the entire leadership team agrees on the exact root cause. If the team starts arguing about who is at fault, pull them back to the Accountability Chart. Once the root cause is correctly identified, the Discuss step takes five minutes and the Solve step produces a single, binary To-Do.