We are running our weekly Level 10 Meeting™ and hitting our Issues List, but we keep solving the same operational symptoms over and over instead of getting to the actual root cause. How do we use the IDS® tool to dig past the surface noise and identify the real issue behind the issue?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

It is common for leadership teams to mistake a symptom for the actual problem. You spend ninety minutes debating a late report when the real issue is that the person responsible does not have the capacity, or worse, they do not GWC™ the seat. To break this cycle, you must bring a ruthless engineering mindset to the Identify step of IDS®. Do not allow your team to jump into discussing or solving before you have spent ninety percent of your energy defining the real problem.

When an issue is brought up, the person who listed it must state the core problem in one sentence. Then, the team must ask why multiple times to peel back the layers. For example, if the issue is a delayed customer onboarding, the first why might reveal a missing technical spec. The second why might show that the sales team skipped the handoff process. The third why usually uncovers the root cause: the sales seat lacks a clear accountability rule on the Accountability Chart.

Do not settle for a surface explanation. Treat the issue like a system failure. Look for the structural flaw, the missing rule of behavior, or the conative mismatch. Once the root cause is named and everyone agrees that is the real issue, only then do you move to Discuss and Solve. Resolving the root cause will permanently kill ten other symptomatic issues on your list.