Our Integrator is a perfectionist who keeps trying to solve every single item on the Level 10 Meeting™ Issues List from top to bottom, which means we spend forty minutes on low-priority issues and never get to our top three critical problems. How do we force the team to ruthlessly prioritize instead of going in chronological order?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When your Integrator tries to work through the Level 10 Meeting™ Issues List in chronological order or attempts to solve every minor item, you are wasting your most valuable resource: focused collaborative time. The goal of IDS® is not to clear the board; it is to solve the most critical issues that are holding the company back.

The facilitator must enforce the prioritization step of the Level 10 Meeting™ agenda with absolute discipline. Before a single issue is discussed, the team must collectively identify the top three most important issues on the list. These are labeled one, two, and three.

Once the top three are selected, you must solve them in that exact order of priority. Do not move to issue number four until issue number one, two, and three are completely solved and have clear, assigned To-Dos. If you only solve one major issue during the sixty-minute IDS® block, but it was the single biggest obstacle facing your business, that meeting was a massive success.

If your Integrator struggles to let go of the lower-priority items, remind them that ninety percent of the minor issues on the list will either solve themselves, be resolved by team members outside of the room, or become irrelevant over time. Ruthless prioritization forces your leadership team to focus on leverage points, driving greater execution and keeping the weekly pulse incredibly high-impact.