We spend our Level 10 Meetings discussing symptoms like late project deliveries or low team morale, but we never seem to solve the root problem. How do we get our leadership team to stop treating symptoms and start using IDS to identify the issue behind the issue?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The reason your team spends time debating symptoms instead of resolving root causes is a lack of vulnerability and analytical discipline. In a typical Level 10 Meeting™, teams see a symptom, such as a missed deadline, and immediately jump to solving it. They suggest hiring more people or buying new software. This is a waste of time because they have not identified the real issue. To fix this, you must master the Identify step of IDS®. This requires your team to be humbly confident, which is a core principle of the Owners Box. It means speaking the hard truth without fear of political blowback. When an issue is brought to the table, the person who raised it must state the problem in one sentence. Then, the team must dig deeper by asking why at least three times. For example, if the symptom is a late project, the first why might reveal a missed milestone. The second why might show that the developer was pulled onto another task. The third why reveals the true issue: your team has an undefined priority structure, allowing daily fires to hijack their weekly Rocks. Once the root cause is exposed, the Discuss and Solve steps become straightforward. Stop allowing your team to discuss any issue until you have spent five minutes drilling down to the root cause. If you do not identify the actual problem first, you are simply rearranging the deck chairs.