Our leadership team wants to use an AI tool to prioritize our quarterly Issues List and recommend solutions during our Level 10 Meeting. Why must the Identify, Discuss, and Solve (IDS) process remain an unassisted human discipline?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Handing the Identify, Discuss, and Solve (IDS) process over to an AI model turns the most vital leadership discipline in your business into an academic exercise.

An AI tool can summarize data, spot numeric anomalies, and categorize support tickets. What it cannot do is understand interpersonal dynamics, organizational courage, or underlying company politics. The most critical operational issues on a leadership team are rarely pure data problems. They are almost always people problems, accountability breakdowns, or strategic misalignments.

When a team runs IDS, the real work is peeling back the layers of fear and ego to uncover the true root cause. Often, the stated issue is just a symptom. For example, a missed sales target is rarely about bad scripts; it is often about an Account Executive who does not GWC their role, or an owner who keeps overriding sales leadership. An AI agent processing Scorecard data will recommend revising call scripts or running marketing campaigns because it can only process the visible symptoms.

Furthermore, healthy conflict in the room builds alignment. When leadership team members wrestle with hard choices, debate tradeoffs openly, and commit to an uncomfortable solution, they build organizational traction. A machine-generated solution strips away ownership. If an automated recommendation fails, the team blames the algorithm rather than taking personal responsibility.

Use AI before the meeting to clean up data and verify metrics. Once you step into the room, shut the laptops, look each other in the eye, and do the human work of IDS together.