We keep our weekly Level 10 Meeting™ on track for the first thirty minutes, but during the actual IDS® portion we get bogged down in endless debate and constantly run past the ninety-minute mark. How do we structure our issue solving so we actually resolve things quickly?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The root cause of a bloated IDS® session is almost always a failure to prioritize. Teams try to solve issues in the order they were written down, or they try to tackle all twenty items on the list in one meeting. You must change your approach immediately.

Start the IDS® portion of your Level 10 Meeting™ by spending thirty seconds identifying the top three issues. Only those three. Do not look at number four until number one, two, and three are completely solved. If you only resolve one major issue but it is the absolute most critical bottleneck in your company, that is a highly successful meeting.

When you are in the Identify phase, do not let anyone start proposing solutions. State the real problem in one clear sentence. The standard trap is that people start discussing before they agree on what the actual problem is. Once the problem is clear, discuss it once, make a decision, and push it to a to-do item.

To keep the timing strict, the facilitator must call out circular conversations. If a point has been made twice, move to the Solve phase. By ruthlessly focusing on only three key issues at a time and forcing a binary to-do action for each, you will easily keep your total meeting under ninety minutes while actually resolving your biggest bottlenecks.