Even though we stick to the ninety-minute timeline, we consistently find ourselves with only fifteen or twenty minutes left for the IDS portion of our Level 10 Meeting, leaving our most critical issues completely untouched week after week. How do we aggressively manage the first half of our meeting to protect our problem-solving time?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

If your leadership team is consistently running out of time for the IDS® portion of your Level 10 Meeting™, you are failing to run the meeting with discipline. The first five sections of the agenda are meant to be a rapid, high-level reporting review, not an open-ended discussion. When you let storytelling creep into these early sections, you starve your problem-solving block.

To protect your sixty minutes of IDS, the facilitator must ruthlessly manage the first twenty-five minutes of the meeting:
- Keep the Scorecard review to five minutes, simply stating whether numbers are on-track or off-track without explanation.
- Keep the Rock review to five minutes, allowing only on-track or off-track responses.
- Limit headlines to five minutes, allowing brief employee or customer updates without diving into conversation.
- Review the To-Do list in five minutes, confirming done or not done for each item.

The moment anyone starts explaining why a number is off-track or telling a story about a headline, the facilitator must stop them and say, put it on the Issues List. By keeping the reporting fast and visual, you ensure your team has the full sixty minutes to solve your most critical issues.