IDS for the Experienced Leader
Have you ever sat through a series of L10 meetings where the list of seemingly infinite issues was resolved back-to-back, in record time, at a 95% solve rate? At first you probably thought “Wow team, we have been nailing this IDS process lately!” and are giving the meetings a 10/10 at the close. Then within 30 minutes of returning to your desk, you get slammed with the same recurring issues you thought were solved at last week’s L10…or were they? There were so many, who can keep track?
Truly effective IDS is not about quantity but QUALITY of resolution. So often we use the IDS list as a parking lot for our thoughts and feelings, giving us a safe space to dump momentary challenges. Many of these so-called issues are one-off outliers, could be resolved through a brief conversation of radical candor between two team members, or are in fact Headlines or Cascading Messages disguised as issues.
I call this pattern “lazy EOS” - going through the motions of the system without doing the disciplined work it actually requires. It looks like progress on paper: issues logged, issues closed, box checked. But it’s borrowed time, and eventually you pay it back with interest when the same fire reignites two or three L10s later.
Allow me to recalibrate the masses by giving examples of what a solvable business issue looks like:
ISSUE: We have had a number of repeat customer complaints about our product/service and need to drill down to the root cause and fix the problem.
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HEADLINE: We had one disgruntled customer write a bad review on our Google page. While we know why this person is upset and have made an effort to remediate, we feel this is a one-off situation and will continue to monitor the product/service for opportunities going forward.
ISSUE: We are consistently missing the mark week over week on our marketing lead generation scorecard metric, and the Marketing team has not reported any issues with production. Let’s drop the metric down to our issues list and figure out where our efforts are going astray.
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CASCADING MESSAGE: Dear Leadership team, we’re sure you’ve noticed the marketing lead gen metric trending red the last few weeks. We have had our Content Creator out on leave and recognized a skills gap that we are working with the Marketing Coordinator to close.
ISSUE: We have a top performing employee who has been failing to GWC their new seat since their promotion, despite several coaching and training attempts. Since CAPACITY seems to be the recurring concern here, it’s time to evaluate whether this is an RPRS fit issue or a seat design issue.
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OFFLINE / 1-ON-1 MEETING: My employee has been struggling to follow through on their accountabilities and I’m not sure where my LMA is falling short. As my manager, can you help me process this situation and see if I can level up my LMA or determine if this is truly a GWC/RPRS issue?
ISSUE: Every order over $10k requires manual sign-off from three separate people before it can ship, and it’s adding 2-3 days to our fulfillment time. We need to redesign the approval workflow.
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CASCADING MESSAGE: Team, just a heads up that shipping has been a little slower than usual this month. We will be pressure testing a new approval process over the next week and would like your feedback on its effectiveness using this form.
CASCADING ISSUE FROM DEPARTMENT TO LEADERSHIP: Two of our department heads have conflicting priorities that are creating bottlenecks for their teams, and we need leadership alignment on which priority takes precedence.
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OFFLINE / 1-ON-1 MEETING BETWEEN LEADERS: Our priorities seem to be conflicting, yet they are both important to achieving our 1-year goal. Let’s brainstorm ways we can work in complement instead of at odds with these priorities, and if we can’t come to a resolution then we will escalate this to the Leadership issues list.
Can you see through these examples how a team-oriented IDS issue differs from something that should live as a Headline, Cascading Message, or in an Offline/1-on-1 meeting? As a Fractional/Interim Integrator and Integrator Coach, I’d much rather see teams use their IDS time to drill down into root causes of the meaty issues that impact the bigger picture, and not the one-off situations that could easily be solved through effective communication or a direct conversation.
At the end of the day, IDS isn’t a box to check somewhere between the Segue and the Conclusion… it’s the mechanism that keeps your business honest with itself. Teams that treat it with real discipline don’t just solve more issues, they solve the right ones the first time. That distinction is what separates an organization running on EOS from an organization merely reciting it. If you recognize your own meetings in the “lazy EOS” pattern I’ve described here, that’s not a failure - it’s simply the next thing to fix.
If your IDS process could use a gut check, let’s talk.
