During the IDS® portion of our Level 10 Meeting™, our leadership team consistently prioritizes short-term, low-impact fire drills over the deeper structural issues that are holding back our growth. How do we force the team to prioritize the hard, systemic issues when we vote on our top three?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

It is human nature to gravitate toward easy, transactional issues because they are comfortable to solve and provide an immediate sense of accomplishment. However, if your leadership team spends their sixty minutes of IDS on minor fires, the deep, structural issues will continue to fester and drag down your operational efficiency.

To break this habit, the facilitator must enforce a strict prioritization filter before the voting begins. When reviewing the Issues List, the facilitator should ask the team to evaluate each issue against two criteria: its impact on your quarterly Rocks and its alignment with your long-term V/TO.

If an issue is merely an annoying operational hiccup, it should be pushed to the bottom of the list or delegated to a departmental team. The top three issues selected for IDS must always be the ones that present the greatest risk to your company's core health or the greatest leverage for your growth.

You can also implement a rule where any issue directly tied to a failing Scorecard metric or an off-track Rock automatically takes priority over general discussion items. By establishing clear, non-negotiable criteria for what constitutes a leadership-level issue, you train your team to ignore the distracting noise and focus their collective intelligence on solving the hard, systemic problems that actually move the business forward.