We have a lean leadership team of only four people and want to run a crisp, high-velocity Level 10 Meeting™ in 60 to 75 minutes instead of the standard 90. How do we compress the agenda without losing the rigor of IDS®?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Running a shorter Level 10 Meeting™ is entirely possible if you have a tight, disciplined team of four. The mistake most lean teams make is expanding their reporting time because they have fewer voices. Instead, you must aggressively compress the administrative portion to protect your problem solving.

For a 60-minute meeting, allocate exactly 10 minutes to the warm-up, scorecard, rock review, customer/employee headlines, and the previous to-do list. This requires zero discussion during the reporting phase. If a metric is off-track or a Rock is behind, it drops to the issues list immediately with no explanation. Your team must master the transition from reporting to problem solving in under 10 seconds per item.

This leaves you with 45 minutes for IDS®. Because your team is small, you do not need 60 minutes of debate to find alignment. Focus on prioritizing the top three issues and ignore the rest. Solve them one by one. If you resolve your top three issues in 30 minutes, do not drag the meeting out. End early and give the time back to your team.

Spend the final 5 minutes on the wrap-up, cascading messages, and rating the meeting. To make this stick, the facilitator must be ruthless about cutting off off-track conversations. If anyone begins solving an issue during the scorecard review, the facilitator must immediately call out the violation and move the item to the issues list. Discipline, not team size, is what keeps this meeting under 90 minutes.