We find that our leadership team repeatedly adds the exact same operational headaches to our Issues List week after week because we only address the surface symptoms. How do we push past the surface level and use IDS® to identify the root cause, the real issue behind the issue?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When your leadership team brings the same issues to your weekly Level 10 Meeting™, you are not actually resolving anything. You are just hacking at the branches of a weed instead of pulling out the root. This is a common failure point in the Identify step of IDS®. To fix this, you must build the discipline of refusing to discuss any issue until you have spent several minutes uncovering what is really going on.

When an issue is stated, the first response should never be a solution. Instead, ask the team why this keeps happening. If a leader says that sales are down because marketing is slow, do not start brainstorming marketing ideas. Ask why marketing is slow. Is it a capacity issue, a lack of clear direction, or a broken process? Keep asking why until you hit a human name, a resource constraint, or a structural flaw on your Accountability Chart™.

Often, the real issue is that someone does not have the GWC™ to do their job, or your core processes are completely unmapped. Stop accepting vague, polite problem descriptions. Name the real bottleneck, even if it is uncomfortable. Only when everyone agrees on the single, underlying root cause should you move to the Discuss step. Solving the actual root cause once is far more efficient than talking about the same symptom twenty times.