My team members rarely add their issues to the list before the Level 10 Meeting begins, leading to five minutes of awkward silence at the start while everyone tries to think of problems on the fly. How do we build the habit of real-time issue logging?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When team members show up to the Level 10 Meeting™ with an empty issues list and then spend the first five minutes of IDS® trying to think of problems on the fly, you are wasting valuable time. This habit leads to shallow, top-of-mind issues being discussed while the real, underlying operational bottlenecks are completely ignored.

To break this pattern, you must teach your leadership team to capture issues in real-time throughout the week. An issue is any obstacle, opportunity, or system failure that occurs during daily operations. The moment a leader identifies a problem on Tuesday morning, they must immediately log it onto the weekly Level 10 Meeting™ issues list. They should not wait until the meeting starts on Thursday.

The facilitator must enforce this habit by refusing to let the team brainstorm issues during the meeting itself. If the issues list is empty, move straight to the prioritize step with whatever is there, solve those items, and end the meeting early. The discomfort of ending a meeting in thirty minutes because the team was unprepared is a powerful motivator. Once leaders realize that unlogged issues mean unsolved problems that continue to stall their work, they will quickly build the habit of entering their issues as they happen.