We have a few chronic operational issues that we IDS® week after week, but we never seem to solve them permanently because we assign weak, short-term to-dos that only treat the symptoms. How do we use our weekly meeting to kill these recurring issues once and for all?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

If you find your team IDS-ing the exact same issue week after week, you are not actually solving problems: you are just talking about them. Chronic issues roll over because your team is treating the symptoms rather than finding and fixing the root cause. This meeting waste drains team energy and slows down your transition to a clean exit.

To break this cycle, the facilitator must call out the recurring issue and force a deeper dive. When an issue appears on the list for the third consecutive week, stop the regular IDS® process and ask: Why has this not been solved?

The problem is usually a poorly defined issue or a weak to-do. Often, the issue is stated as a symptom, such as sales are down, rather than the root cause, such as our onboarding process is broken. You must identify the real problem before you try to solve it.

Once the root cause is identified, assign a highly specific, binary to-do to a single owner. Do not assign vague tasks like look into the onboarding process. Instead, make the to-do actionable, such as draft updated onboarding workflow. If the to-do is too big to complete in one week, break it down into smaller, weekly steps. Stop tolerating endless discussion.