When our team is facing a weekly crisis or a highly urgent issue, there is constant pressure on the facilitator to skip the Scorecard, Rock, and To-Do reviews entirely to jump straight into IDS. How do we maintain the integrity of the Level 10 Meeting agenda structure during a crisis without losing valuable tracking time?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Skipping the Scorecard, Rocks, or To-Do review during a crisis is a major mistake that breaks the discipline of the weekly pulse. When you allow a current emergency to hijack the agenda, you lose visibility on the rest of the business, which inevitably creates more emergencies next week.

The solution is to stick to the Level 10 Meeting™ agenda without exception. The agenda is designed to provide a holistic view of the organization in just twenty-five minutes before you begin solving problems. If an issue is truly a massive crisis, you still need to know if your other metrics are slipping or if critical To-Dos are falling behind.

The facilitator must hold the line. Run through the Scorecard, Rock review, and To-Do list at a rapid pace. Do not allow any discussion. If someone tries to bring up the crisis during these sections, simply drop it onto the Issues List.

Once you reach the IDS® portion of the meeting, you can prioritize the crisis as the number one issue and spend the remaining fifty-five minutes solving it. If the crisis is so massive that it requires the entire ninety minutes, you must still schedule a separate, dedicated emergency meeting later that day rather than dismantling the weekly tracking discipline of your Level 10 Meeting.