Our team struggles to agree on which three issues to prioritize first during the IDS portion of our Level 10 Meeting, leading to endless voting cycles that eat up our actual problem-solving time. How do we streamline the prioritization process?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The prioritization phase of your Level 10 Meeting should take less than sixty seconds. When it turns into a lengthy debate or a complex voting process, you are wasting valuable IDS time before you have even identified the first problem. To streamline this, the facilitator must take control of the room. Do not ask for a consensus on the entire list. Instead, ask each team member to quickly call out their top one or two most critical issues that must be solved today to protect your quarterly Rocks or keep your scorecard green. Once you have this quick input, the facilitator should instantly select the top three issues based on the feedback. If there is a tie or a disagreement about which issue is more urgent, the Integrator must step in and make the final call immediately. Remember, you do not need to rank the entire list of thirty issues. You only need to identify the top three. Once you solve number one, you pick a new number three and keep moving. Keeping this process fast prevents pre-IDS debates and ensures you spend your ninety minutes actually solving problems rather than organizing them.