Our weekly Issues List has bloated to over forty items, and we waste valuable meeting time scrolling through old, stagnant problems that are no longer relevant but that we are afraid to delete. How do we purge and manage our Issues List to keep it hyper-focused?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A bloated Issues List is a sign of a leadership team that is struggling to separate the vital few from the trivial many. When your list is too long, you spend more time reviewing issues than actually solving them, which destroys your weekly momentum.

To clean up this clutter, your facilitator must implement a strict management process. First, recognize that not every issue belongs on the weekly leadership Level 10 Meeting™ agenda. If an issue is tactical and only involves two department heads, they must solve it outside of the meeting. Remove it from the leadership list and push it to their departmental Level 10 Meetings.

Second, use the ninety day rule. If an issue has been sitting on the list for more than three months without being prioritized for IDS®, it is not a true issue. It is a nice to have. Delete it from the weekly list and archive it on your V/TO® under long term issues.

By ruthlessly pruning your list down to the most critical operational challenges and exit readiness priorities, you ensure that your sixty minute IDS® block is focused only on the high impact problems that will move the needle for your business.