The Issue-Solving Track (IDS)

Read time - 5 minutes

The skill that built your company is the same skill keeping it stuck.

You got to product-market fit by being the ultimate firefighter. Something broke, you fixed it. A problem showed up, you pivoted and figured it out. That instinct to grab the biggest issue and handle it right now is how you got here.

While solving the company’s biggest problems will always be your most important job, at some point you’ll become the bottleneck if you don’t have a structure to empower your team.

Even worse, If you're always receiving the next hot problem and reacting to it, you're never working your biggest priorities, never thinking ahead, never giving yourself the space to be creative. You built the company on firefighting, and now firefighting is the ceiling.

The issue-solving track is one of the first skills I build with teams as they scale, because it's what turns a group of executors into a real executive team that makes high-quality decisions in less and less time.

Here's the whole thing. The pain it fixes, where it lives in the system, what has to be true first, and how to run it.

Three kinds of pain this fixes

Firefighting, the one above. The instinct that built the company now keeps you trapped in reaction.

Talking in circles. Even great teams get in a room, start talking about an issue, and keep talking about it without ever landing on something that makes it go away. A month later the same issue is back, and that's where frustration and burnout creep in.

Constant interruption. When your people don't know when they're supposed to raise issues, they bring you whatever feels hottest the second it hits them. So you're interrupted all day, and so is everyone else, with each person's biggest problem of the minute. It wears you out, and it wears the team out too.

Where this lives in the system

Every business runs on six things. Vision, People, Data, Issues, Process, and Traction. The tools I teach are there to make you strong in all six, and the issue-solving track is how you get strong in Issues.

It has two parts. The first is the Issues List, a running list of the issues, challenges, obstacles, and opportunities that build up across your team through the week. Things sit on that list until the part of your weekly Level 10 meeting where it's time to prioritize and solve them. Building and maintaining that list, and knowing what to save for that designated time versus what's a true emergency, is a skill and an art in itself.

The second part is how you solve what's on the list. That's IDS.

Three things have to be true first

Open and honest. If you just want head nods and to tell people what to do, you don't need any of this, you can keep directing. But if you want to scale an organization with real leaders who use their judgment and their creative talent, you have to build a culture where people can give hard feedback and take it. Without that, you'll never identify the real issue or land a real solve.

Discipline. You and everyone on the team have to capture issues the moment they come up. Write it down, drop a voice note, get it onto the list. If you let things sit, your mind goes blank when it's time to solve, and the issue that mattered on Tuesday is gone by Thursday. The whole team capturing issues in one structured place is what makes this work.

Preparation and intensity. This is one 90-minute meeting a week, and you and your team should prepare like it's the most important hour of your week, because it is. Full focus, no distractions. That's how you get the most out of the time.

IDS: identify, discuss, solve

You get through the meeting, review your numbers and your priorities, surface any new issues, and now the list is built and it's time to work the top three. Here's how each step runs:

Identify (dig to the root)

Whatever lands on the list is not the issue. "Sales are off" is not an issue, it's a symptom of a root cause, and your job is to dig until you reach something you can solve.

So you start digging. Is the rep not making enough calls, or making plenty of calls to the wrong people? Is there a process for him to follow? Is there even enough demand, a big enough list to work? Do we know how to qualify our leads? Is the product being communicated the right way? There are fifteen different root issues behind "sales are down," and the work is narrowing to the one you solve today.

Three things help you get there, and you don't move on until the team agrees:

• Restate it. If I say the issue is "our sales process is broken," I ask a colleague to say it back to me. If it comes out the same, we're probably on track. If it comes out different, we're not there yet, and we debate until we land on the real one.

• Name the type. Is this a people issue, a process issue, a data issue? Naming the category helps you narrow fast.

• Name the owner. Who's accountable for getting this solved? If nobody knows, that's your first issue, and you solve who-owns-this before you solve anything else.

Discuss (briefly)

Once you agree on the issue, you discuss the potential solutions. It's called a brief discussion for a reason. People get heard, they lay out what they think the fix is, and you keep it moving. Watch for the stuff that eats the clock, the rambling, the repeating, the politicking for your answer, the tangents. You're after one thing, what it takes to make this issue go away.

Solve (and document it)

The solve is an action everyone agrees on. Sometimes it's a simple to-do. Sometimes it's a future priority or a Rock, because the issue is really a project that can't be handled in a few minutes. Sometimes it's a message that needs to go out to the rest of the company.

And sometimes the solve is another meeting. If you've got a five-person leadership team but only two people are needed to work something out, and it'll take 15 minutes, send those two off to come back with a solution instead of burning everyone's time.

Whatever it is, you document it, the team agrees it will solve the issue, and you take it off the list. Then you're on to number two, and number three. Nominate your top three, solve those three, and if there's time left, keep going.

That's the track. The firefighting instinct that built your company doesn't have to run your calendar forever, and once you give your team a list, a designated hour, and the discipline to dig to the root, you'll watch problems get solved once and stay solved. It's one of the most satisfying things to see a team learn how to do.

Talk to you next week,

Mike