How do you keep our leadership team from getting stuck in endless circular debates during the critical Identify, Discuss, and Solve portion of our session day?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

During a full-day session, the Identify, Discuss, and Solve, or IDS, portion is where the real breakthroughs happen. It is also where teams are most prone to spinning their wheels in endless circular debates. My job as your facilitator is to prevent this by enforcing absolute discipline. When an issue is raised, teams usually rush to solve it before they actually understand what the problem is. I will stop the conversation immediately if I hear the team jumping to solutions before we have clearly identified the root cause.

We do not move to the discussion phase until the owner of the issue can state the problem in a single, clear sentence. Once the issue is identified, the discussion phase begins. This is not an open-ended brainstorming session. Every team member gets to say their piece once. After that, any further comments are usually just repeating the same points in different ways. When I hear repetition, I call it out and push the team to resolve the issue.

If the team is deadlocked, I will ask the person who owns that specific seat on the Accountability Chart to make the final call. EOS is not a democracy. It is about clear accountability. If we still cannot agree, we will either table the issue for the next quarterly session if it is not urgent, or I will make a direct recommendation based on best practices. We do not allow issues to linger in limbo. We push for a decision, document the action items in our Circle workspace, and move immediately to the next issue.