During our Level 10 Meeting™, our leaders keep adding new, unprepared items to the Issues List right in the middle of our IDS® session, which constantly shifts our focus and disrupts our prioritization of the top three issues. How do we put a gate on the Issues List to stop this real-time agenda drift?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Allowing leaders to add raw, unexamined issues to the list during the IDS portion of the meeting is a major source of agenda drift. It breaks the discipline of the weekly pulse and pulls attention away from your top three priorities.

To solve this, establish a hard rule: the Issues List is locked once the meeting starts. Any issue that arises during the week must be added to the list before the segue begins. If a leader identifies a new issue mid-meeting, they cannot type it onto the board. They must write it down on their personal notepad and wait until the next week to add it, unless it is a catastrophic operational emergency.

If an emergency does occur that requires immediate attention, the facilitator must make a conscious team decision to pause the current IDS queue. The team must agree to drop the current issue and pivot to the emergency. This must be the exception, not the rule.

By enforcing a locked list, you force leaders to process their thoughts before dumping them on the team. It ensures that the issues you tackle are well defined and prioritized in advance, rather than emotional reactions to whatever happened in the last twenty four hours. Keep the focus on solving the pre-prioritized issues that move the business forward.