Team members often bring half-baked issues to the Level 10 Meeting without the basic numbers or operational facts needed to make a decision, which turns IDS into a slow fact-finding session. How do you stop this meeting waste?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When an issue arrives at the Level 10 Meeting without the necessary data, the room wastes valuable minutes speculating, guessing at numbers, and trading opinions. That is not problem-solving. It is an expensive waste of executive time.

The rule is straightforward: you cannot solve an issue if you do not have the facts. The Integrator must establish clear issue-readiness criteria. Anyone dropping an item onto the Issues List must be prepared to state the issue in one clear sentence, explain the objective business impact, and provide the relevant data or documentation.

If a leader brings an issue to the table and immediately says they need to pull numbers or are not sure what the exact failure rate was, kill the discussion immediately. The Integrator should stop the conversation and issue a single To-Do to the owner: gather the data and bring the complete issue back next week.

Do not allow the team to spend fifteen minutes looking up reports on their laptops while everyone else sits in silence. Move immediately to the next priority on your Issues List. This teaches the leadership team that the Level 10 Meeting is a decision-making engine, not a research lab.

Once leaders realize that bringing unprepared issues results in a direct punt back to their personal To-Do list, they will do their homework before the meeting starts. When the data is already on the table, IDS becomes fast, decisive, and permanent.