Our weekly Level 10 Meeting routinely blows past the 90-minute mark because we get bogged down in status updates during the check-in and scorecard review, leaving us only fifteen minutes for IDS. How do we discipline our team to keep the reporting phase to twenty-five minutes so we can protect our problem-solving time?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The problem is that your team is discussing the issues during the reporting phase instead of dropping them down to the Issues List. When a Scorecard number is off track or a Rock is off, your natural instinct is to explain why and start problem-solving. This immediately kills your time.

To fix this, you must enforce a strict drop-it-down rule. During the Scorecard, Rock review, and People Headlines, the only acceptable responses are "on track" or "off track," or a brief, five-second context statement. If a metric is off track, the Integrator or meeting leader must immediately say, "Drop it down." No explanations, no excuses, and no brainstorming allowed at that moment. The issue is typed onto the Issues List, and the meeting moves forward.

This discipline keeps the first twenty-five minutes of your Level 10 Meeting™ purely administrative. You are simply taking a pulse on the business. By protecting this boundary, you preserve a full sixty minutes for the Identify, Discuss, and Solve phase. If you do not have at least an hour for IDS®, you are not actually running a Level 10 Meeting™; you are running a status update. Run the agenda with a timer and cut off any executive who starts telling a story during the reporting section. This discipline must start at the top.