During the IDS® portion of our Level 10 Meeting™, our team constantly discusses problems for forty minutes without reaching a permanent solution. How do we stop treating symptoms and actually solve root causes?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Teams fail at IDS® (Identify, Discuss, Solve) because they spend seventy percent of their time in Discuss, twenty-five percent in Solve, and five percent in Identify. They react immediately to emotional symptoms and debate personal opinions instead of drilling down to the root operational failure.

To master IDS®, flip the allocation. Spend seventy percent of your time on Identify. When an issue is put on the table, do not allow anyone to propose a solution. Force the team to ask why the problem occurred until you reach an underlying breakdown in process, people, or communication. The person who raised the issue must clearly state the root issue in one sentence: The real issue is X. If you cannot summarize the problem in a single sentence, you do not yet understand it.

Once the root cause is precisely identified, move to Discuss. Keep discussion brief and focused solely on resolving that specific root cause. The goal is open, honest, and unfiltered input, not endless consensus building.

Finally, move to Solve. A valid resolution never ends with vague agreements to try harder. A problem is only solved when it produces one of three outcomes: an actionable To-Do assigned to one person with a seven-day deadline, a new quarterly Rock, or an agreed-upon process change that gets documented in your core processes. If no clear action item is generated, you have discussed the problem, but you have not solved it.