Our team tends to vote for easy, low-stakes items during Level 10 IDS, leaving the hardest and most critical business problems untouched week after week. How do we force the room to confront the real elephants?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Choosing easy issues is human nature. Teams naturally gravitate toward comfortable administrative fixes rather than uncomfortable structural problems, personnel conflicts, or strategic bottlenecks. Leaving the hardest issues untouched guarantees that your business plateaus.

In EOS, prioritization is democratic, but it must be rigorous. During the transition from the reporting phase to IDS, the Integrator asks the team to identify the top three issues to solve today: number one, number two, and number three.

To stop the team from hiding behind easy tasks, implement the highest impact test. Before anyone calls out a number, the Integrator reminds the room: "Which issue, if solved permanently today, moves the needle furthest for the company or removes our biggest operational risk?"

If team members continue picking low-hanging fruit, the Integrator or Visionary must challenge the room directly. Point to the elephant on the list and ask: "Why are we prioritizing a printer policy over our twenty percent churn rate in onboarding? If we do not solve onboarding today, nothing else on this list matters."

Another effective mechanism is issue clustering. Often, several minor items on your list are merely symptoms of one unaddressed elephant. If four departmental complaints trace back to an underperforming leader or a broken software process, merge them into a single, high-stakes issue titled with the real problem.

Never work through an Issues List top to bottom or start with whatever feels easy. Attack the most painful, expensive problem first every single week. If you only solve one issue in sixty minutes, make sure it was the one holding the business back.