During the IDS portion of our Level 10 Meeting, people immediately jump in with opinions and hypothetical scenarios before we have even agreed on what the core problem is. How do we stop these tangents without shutting down honest debate?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The reason IDS fails in most companies is that teams race into Discussion before completing the Identify step. The moment an issue is raised, someone offers a solution, someone else explains why that solution failed four years ago, and within five minutes you are debating a hypothetical scenario that has nothing to do with reality.

To kill this meeting waste, the facilitator must strictly enforce the sequence: Identify, Discuss, Solve. Discussion is forbidden until the root cause is established and agreed upon.

Follow this process to keep IDS on track:

- State the root cause: The person who raised the issue gets the floor first. They must state the real issue in two sentences or less. If they start giving a ten-minute backstory, the facilitator cuts them off and asks, What is the specific problem we need to solve today?
- Align the team: Before anyone debates remedies, the facilitator asks the room, Do we all agree that this is the real root issue? If the team disagrees, you keep digging into the cause. You do not discuss solutions until everyone agrees on the definition of the problem.
- Curtail tangents: If a leader veers off into an unrelated grievance during discussion, the facilitator must immediately call a tangent. Ask the speaker if this is a separate issue. If it is, log it on the list for later and pull the group back to the issue at hand.

Debate is vital, but unfocused debate is pure waste. Great teams spend the majority of their time precisely identifying the root issue. Once the real problem is identified, the discussion is short and the solution is obvious.