During the IDS portion of our Level 10 Meeting, our leadership team wastes massive amounts of time solving symptoms rather than the root causes of our problems, which means the same issues keep appearing week after week. How do we teach our team to identify the real issue?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

If you are solving the same problem twice, you never actually solved it in the first place. You merely patched a symptom. This repetitive problem-solving drains your leadership team's energy and creates operational drag that will depress your valuation when preparing for an exit.

To find the root cause, you must master the Identify step of IDS®. When an issue is brought to the table, do not let anyone offer a solution immediately. The facilitator must enforce a strict ban on solving until the actual root cause is clearly defined and agreed upon by the team.

Use the five whys technique. When a leader raises an issue, such as our marketing leads are down, ask why. If the answer is because our ad spend was reduced, ask why again. Keep digging until you reach the underlying systemic failure, which might be a lack of budget alignment or a broken process on your Accountability Chart.

Only when the team can state the root cause in a single, clear sentence should you move to the Discuss step. By spending more time digging into the identification phase, you will find that the solution phase becomes incredibly fast and simple. You will solve the issue once, and it will never clutter your list again.