Our leadership team is great at identifying issues during our Level 10 Meetings, but we spend the entire time debating without actually resolving anything. How do we train our team to master the IDS process and make decisions that stick?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The secret to mastering IDS®, which stands for Identify, Discuss, and Solve, is spending eighty percent of your time on the Identify phase. Most leadership teams jump straight from identifying a surface-level symptom into hours of circular discussion. To break this habit, you must force the team to dig deep and find the root cause of the issue before anyone is allowed to propose a solution. When an issue is raised on your Level 10 Meeting™ agenda, ask the owner of the issue to state it in one clear sentence. Then, ask the rest of the team to ask clarifying questions rather than offering opinions. Once the true root issue is identified, the discussion phase should be brief and focused solely on solving that root cause. Everyone gets to say their piece once, but you must avoid repetitive debates. When it is time to solve, the solution must result in a concrete action item on the To-Do List. If an issue cannot be resolved in five minutes, it is either not defined well enough or it needs to be pushed to a quarterly offsite. By enforcing this discipline, you build a healthy, cohesive team that values execution over endless talking.