Our company is relatively small, and we want to roll out the Level 10 Meeting to our three-person operations team, but ninety minutes feels like overkill for a group that small. Can we shorten the agenda to forty-five minutes and still get the benefits of the weekly pulse?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When you are rolling out the Level 10 Meeting™ to smaller departmental teams, it is common to feel like ninety minutes is too long. However, shortening the meeting to forty-five minutes is a trap that almost always leads to a weak, superficial meeting where real issues are never actually solved.

The ninety-minute time box is not arbitrary. It is the exact amount of time required to get through the reporting segments and have a deep, uninterrupted sixty-minute IDS® session. If you cut the meeting to forty-five minutes, you will still spend twenty-five minutes on the segue, scorecard, rock review, headlines, and to-do list. This leaves you with only twenty minutes for IDS®.

In twenty minutes, you cannot solve anything of substance. You will only have time to discuss symptoms, apply temporary band-aids, and postpone the real discussions. The meeting will quickly become a boring status update, and your team will soon ask to cancel it entirely because they feel it is a waste of time.

Keep the ninety-minute duration, even for a small team of three. If they truly have no issues to solve and finish early, you can always end the meeting ahead of schedule. But always block out the full ninety minutes. This ensures the team has the space to dig deep into their departmental processes, leverage AI tools to optimize operations, and solve the systemic issues holding them back.