EOS IDS: How to use the Identify, Discuss, Solve process in your L10 meeting

Every leadership team has sat through a meeting where someone raises a problem, everyone shares an opinion, the conversation meanders for twenty minutes, and then someone glances at the clock and says, "Let's put a pin in it."

The pin never comes out, the issue resurfaces three weeks later, slightly uglier, and you do the whole dance again.

This is exactly what an IDS in EOS was built to kill.

IDS stands for Identify, Discuss, Solve. It is the problem-solving engine at the heart of every Level 10 Meeting, and when executed with a bit of discipline, it ensures that a business issue gets solved once and stays solved.

The best way to understand it is not a list of definitions, it's to watch one issue go through the machine, start to finish.

The short version

In a hurry? Here's what you need to know.

IDS is the sixty-minute centerpiece of your weekly Level 10 Meeting, and it also anchors your higher-stakes Quarterly and Annual planning sessions. The most common trap teams fall into is rushing the Identify step, which causes them to waste an hour fixing a surface symptom while the root cause keeps festering underneath. To prevent this, a real Solve must always produce a concrete To-Do with one owner and a hard due date. Anything less is just an ongoing conversation, not a resolution.

Now, the story.

The IDS process in action: one issue, start to finish

It's Tuesday morning, 9:25. The Level 10 Meeting has reached the IDS block, and the team has just picked its top three issues for the hour. Sitting at number one, in the exact words someone typed into the Issues List last Thursday:

"We keep missing delivery deadlines."

Around the table: the Visionary, the Integrator, the Head of Sales, the Head of Production, and the Head of Operations. Everyone has an opinion about this very Issue, and the Head of Production has been bracing for it all week.

Identify: the part where everyone wants to skip to the fix

The Head of Sales speaks first: 

"We just need better deadline reminders. Put alerts in the project tool, problem solved."

This is the moment that decides whether the next thirty minutes are useful or wasted, because what just happened is the most natural reflex in any meeting: someone stated a symptom, and someone else immediately proposed a fix for the symptom.

The Integrator doesn't take the bait. "Hold on, we're not solving yet. Why are we missing deadlines?"

This is the Identify step, and it has exactly one goal: find the real issue underneath the one that was written down. The technique is simple and slightly annoying: keep asking why.

Why are we missing delivery deadlines? Because jobs are arriving in production late.

Why are jobs arriving late? Because the specs aren't logged when the deal is signed, and production can't start without them.

Why aren't the specs logged? Silence. Then the Head of Sales, a little quieter: "Honestly, there's no defined handover between sales and production. Everyone does it their own way."

Three whys, four minutes, and the issue has changed shape entirely: the team doesn't have a deadline problem or a lazy production team, it has an undocumented handover process. 

And this is why Identify comes first and why rushing it is the most expensive mistake in IDS. A team that skips it spends forty-five minutes building deadline alerts on top of a broken process. 

A well-named issue is halfway solved.

Discuss: the part where the conversation could go in circles

Now that the real issue has a name, the floor opens. This is Discuss, and the rules are simple: everyone contributes, no one dominates, and the conversation stays on what's true rather than what's comfortable.

The Head of Production goes first, and says the thing he's been sitting on for months: "I've raised this twice before and it went nowhere. My team gets blamed for late deliveries when the job lands on us a week late."

That's not a fun sentence to say in front of the Head of Sales, but it's also the most valuable sentence of the meeting. The quality of IDS is directly proportional to the team's willingness to name the elephant in the room.

The Head of Sales pushes back: "Fair, but my team isn't trained on what production needs. We don't even know what a complete spec looks like."

The Visionary starts wondering aloud whether the CRM is the problem and whether they should evaluate new tools. The Integrator cuts it off: "That's a different issue. I'm adding it to the bottom of the list. Back to the handover."

Two things just happened that are worth stealing. First, a tangent got parked instead of hijacking the session. Issue B goes on the list; the team stays on Issue A. Second, the Integrator is watching for the moment the discussion stops producing new information. When the same point gets made a third time by a different person, discussion is over.

Total discussion time: eleven minutes.

Solve: the part where most teams fumble it

Here's where the meeting usually dies: the conversation was good and everyone feels heard. Someone offers: "Okay, so we'll tighten up the handover process. Great discussion, everyone."

But that very sentence is not a Solve. Nothing in it says what happens, who does it, or by when. It's the "pin" from the opening of this article, dressed up as progress: three weeks later, the issue will be back.

A real Solve is a decision that produces To-Dos: a specific action, a single owner, a hard date. So the Integrator pushes through the soft ending:

"What exactly are we doing, who owns it, and by when?"

The team lands on two To-Dos:

• The Head of Production drafts a handover checklist covering what a complete spec contains, due Friday.

• The Head of Sales reviews it with him in a thirty-minute session before next week's L10, so it can be rolled out to the sales team the following Monday.

One owner per To-Do, not "sales and production together.". Accountability dies the moment it's shared by a team or a department.

Next week, the To-Dos either got done or they didn't.

Where IDS breaks down

That's how it looks when it works, but for more clarity, here's how it looks when it doesn't. 

• The list gets worked top to bottom. The team starts at item one because it was added first, burns the hour on three easy issues, and never touches the one that actually matters. Fix: spend the first two minutes picking the top three issues by importance, then start.

• The person who raised the issue runs the conversation. They have the most context and the most emotional investment, which makes them the worst possible facilitator. Fix: the Integrator or a designated facilitator owns the clock, cuts off repetition, and forces the pivot to Solve.

• One issue eats the whole hour. If a problem needs more than thirty minutes, it isn't a meeting issue anymore. It's a project, probably a Rock, and it needs its own dedicated session. Fix: call it, convert it, move on.

• The Solve is a vibe, not a decision. "We'll look into it." "Let's keep an eye on it." "Let's circle back next quarter." Banned, all of them. Fix: before any issue closes, the facilitator confirms what exactly is happening, who specifically is doing it, and the date it's done.

• One voice dominates Discuss. The team leaves with one perspective instead of the full picture, and the quiet person who knew the real answer never spoke. Fix: "We haven't heard from everyone. What do you think?" works better than it has any right to.

• The same issue shows up three weeks in a row. That's not bad luck, it's a signal. Either the owner doesn't have capacity, the root cause was misidentified, or the issue needs to be escalated. Fix: after week three, the Integrator names it directly.

Your IDS template, ready to steal

We've put together a free IDS template you can download and use in your next L10: no signup, just copy the Google Sheet and go. One row per issue, with fields for the issue as raised, the root cause, the decision, To-Dos, owner, and due date.

And when the spreadsheet starts feeling like the bottleneck, Success.co keeps the Issues List, IDS outputs, and To-Dos connected in one place, so every decision made during the meeting is visible to the whole team before the next L10 starts.