Our team members rarely add their issues to the Level 10 Issues List during the week, choosing instead to drop five or six complex items onto the list live during the meeting. How do we stop this last-minute issue dumping and build a healthy pre-meeting habit?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When team members drop complex issues onto the list live during your Level 10 Meeting™, they disrupt the flow and rob the team of the opportunity to prepare. To have a highly effective weekly meeting pulse, your team must cultivate the habit of entering issues in real-time throughout the week, the very moment they occur.

To break the habit of last-minute dumping, you must establish a clear boundary. Set a deadline for when the Issues List is locked for the week, such as twenty-four hours before your meeting starts. Any issue added after that deadline is automatically pushed to the bottom of the list or deferred to the following week, unless it is a genuine, business-stopping emergency.

Additionally, the facilitator must call out this behavior. If a team member tries to introduce a complex, non-emergency issue live, the facilitator should say, this is an important topic, but since it was not on the list before the meeting, we will queue it for next week.

This forces your leaders to manage their departments proactively rather than waiting for the weekly meeting to raise their hand. It also gives the team time to review the list beforehand, ensuring that when you sit down for IDS®, everyone is mentally prepared to debate and solve the most critical priorities. This level of operational discipline is exactly what prepares a leadership team to run autonomously.