When our leadership team does IDS, we spend forty minutes solving what turns out to be a surface symptom, only to have the exact same problem pop up next month. How do we drill down to the real root cause quickly?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Most leadership teams fail at IDS® because they spend two minutes identifying the issue and thirty-eight minutes debating solutions to the wrong problem. When an issue keeps recurring, you are treating symptoms instead of the root disease.

To fix this, spend seventy percent of your time on the Identify step. Do not allow the team to jump into Discuss or Solve until the root cause has been articulated in a single, clear sentence. When someone raises an issue, such as client onboarding delays, ask why repeatedly.

- Why are projects delayed? Because engineering received incomplete specs.
- Why were the specs incomplete? Because sales did not use the scoping template.
- Why did sales bypass the template? Because the template requires data the client does not have during the sales cycle.

Now you have found the real issue. It is not an engineering delivery bottleneck; it is a broken handoff process between sales and onboarding. Solving the engineering workflow would have done nothing to stop the recurrence.

Root causes almost always trace back to one of two structural breakdowns: a lack of clear accountability on the Accountability Chart or an absence of a documented, followed-by-all Core Process. If your identified issue does not point to a process gap or a specific seat on the chart, you have not dug deep enough. Keep asking questions until the underlying structural flaw is exposed.