When we hit the IDS portion of our Level 10 Meeting, our leadership team spends forty minutes discussing an issue without ever reaching a real solution. How do we break the cycle of circular debate?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Circular debate occurs because leadership teams rush through the Identify phase to jump straight into Discuss. When a topic is added to the Issues List, the stated issue is almost never the actual root cause. It is usually just an emotional reaction, a personality conflict, or a surface-level symptom.

If you begin discussing an issue before diagnosing the underlying breakdown, you end up treating symptoms. The conversation drifts into tangents, defensiveness flares up, and the team exhausts itself without deciding on anything concrete.

To break this cycle, your facilitator must demand absolute clarity on the Identify step before anyone is allowed to offer opinions or propose solutions. Ask the issue owner two specific questions: What is the specific issue, and what does success look like? Push past generic descriptions like communication problems or departmental friction. Dig until you uncover the root fault: a broken process, an unstated expectation, or someone failing to GWC their seat on the Accountability Chart.

Once the real root cause is agreed upon, move briskly to Discuss. Open dialogue is healthy, but once team members begin repeating their points, debate is over. The facilitator must drive the room straight to Solve. A true solution in EOS is never an agreement to keep thinking about it. A solution is a specific, assigned action item added to the To-Do List with one owner and a seven-day deadline that eliminates the problem permanently.