Most business problems do not arrive fully grown.
A customer cancellation may begin with an incomplete handoff. A cash problem may begin with invoices going out two days late. A quality problem may begin with one step that experienced employees know to do but nobody has written down. A people problem may begin with a standard that one manager assumes and another manager never heard.
The eventual result gets attention because it is expensive. The early signal is easier to ignore because it looks small.
That is why a good process needs more than documentation. It needs a way to tell us, every week, whether the process is actually working.
In more than 150 sessions with my clients, we have worked together to solve issues using IDS: Identify, Discuss, and Solve. It is the most effective method I have discovered for getting to the real problem and deciding what to do about it, whether the issue is already causing major disruption or still looks small enough to put off.
As a Certified EOS Implementer®, I help the team work through that conversation. The team owns the decisions and the follow-through.
The opportunity is to make that discipline part of how the business operates every week. That is where the Level 10 Meeting comes in.
A result tells you what happened
Revenue, profit, customer retention, cash, and employee turnover matter. Leadership teams should understand them.
They are also often late.
By the time monthly profit falls, the behaviors that produced the result may be several weeks old. By the time a valuable customer leaves, the team may have missed a series of smaller warnings. By the time a project is badly behind, several commitments may already have slipped.
Lagging results are useful for accountability and learning. They are less useful for changing this week's behavior.
A leading indicator gives the team a chance to act while the problem is still small.
The process should reveal its own health
EOS Worldwide describes the Process Component as identifying, simplifying, documenting, and getting the company's core processes followed by all. It describes the EOS Scorecard as a short set of weekly, activity-based numbers that gives the leadership team a pulse on the business.
Let's connect the two.
When a team agrees on a core process, ask:
- Where does this process most often break?
- What can we measure before the customer or financial result is harmed?
- Who owns the number?
- What is the weekly goal?
- What happens when the number is off track?
The best measure is not always the final outcome. It may be the activity that makes a good outcome more likely.
For an invoicing process, the late result might be cash pressure. Earlier measures might include invoices sent within one business day, invoices rejected because information was missing, or unresolved billing questions older than five days.
For customer onboarding, the late result might be churn. Earlier measures might include completed kickoff meetings, overdue customer inputs, incomplete handoffs, or time from signed agreement to first value delivered.
For hiring, the late result might be an unfilled seat or a poor hire. Earlier measures might include qualified interviews completed, scorecards returned on time, or reference checks still open.
The point is not to measure every step. It is to find the few weekly numbers that give the process owner time to respond.
Compliance is not the same as bureaucracy
The word compliance can make people imagine audits, punishment, and paperwork.
I mean something simpler: did we do the important work the way we agreed to do it?
If a team decides that every customer handoff includes four pieces of information, it is reasonable to measure how often all four arrive. If a safety check is required before equipment starts, it is reasonable to know whether the check happened. If every proposal needs margin review above a certain threshold, it is reasonable to see whether the review occurred.
The measure should help the team improve the system. It should not become a weapon for blaming an individual whenever reality does not match the plan.
An off-track number is an invitation to ask better questions:
- Is the process unclear?
- Is the standard unrealistic?
- Does the person responsible have the right tools and capacity?
- Is a handoff breaking down?
- Has the business changed enough that the process needs to change?
The number identifies the smoke. The leadership team still has to find the fire.
Make the weekly L10 your early-warning and problem-solving rhythm
The weekly Level 10 Meeting gives the leadership team a consistent place to notice issues and solve the most important ones. The Scorecard helps reveal off-track performance. Customer and employee headlines, missed commitments, and the team's observations bring other concerns into view.
An off-track number is a signal to investigate. It does not tell you the root cause by itself. Capture the issue on the Issues List rather than turning the Scorecard review into a long discussion. Then prioritize the issues and use IDS: Identify, Discuss, and Solve to work through the ones that matter most.
Solving early and often does not mean treating every small inconvenience as an emergency. It means making room every week to address meaningful issues before delay makes them harder and more expensive to fix.
Put the solution back into the way you work
A productive conversation needs to change what happens after the meeting.
Suppose the Scorecard shows that invoices are going out late. In IDS, the team discovers that completed jobs arrive in accounting without the information needed to bill. Telling accounting to work faster will not solve that handoff.
The team might clarify the information required, update the handoff process, and assign a To-Do with one owner and a due date to put the change into practice. If the current Scorecard does not expose the problem early enough, the team might add or refine a weekly measure, such as the percentage of completed jobs handed to accounting with all required information within one business day.
At the next L10, review whether the To-Do was completed. Over the following weeks, watch whether the process is being followed and the measure improves. If the issue persists, bring it back for deeper work.
Not every issue calls for a new process or a new number. When the root cause is a recurring breakdown, though, the solution should improve the system instead of relying on someone to remember to try harder.
The connection is practical: the Scorecard and team observations reveal the signal, the L10 protects time to solve the issue, and the resulting process changes and commitments make the solution part of everyday work. Weekly review helps the team see whether it is working.
Start with one expensive surprise
Do not begin by adding fifty measures to a dashboard.
Choose one recurring problem that becomes expensive before the leadership team sees it. Trace it backward. Find the earliest useful signal that people can measure consistently and influence this week.
Then assign one owner, agree on one goal, and review the number every week. If it is off track, identify the underlying issue and solve it. If the measure does not help the team make better decisions, improve or replace it.
Documentation creates a shared way to work. A useful weekly measure tells you whether that way of working is producing the intended result.
Small problems can become expensive through delay, rework, lost customers, and wasted leadership time. A useful leading indicator helps you see the warning. A disciplined weekly L10 helps your team do something about it.
For your next leadership conversation, ask:
Which expensive problem in our business begins with a small signal we could see every week?