There’s a powerful play card I carry.
One play. It kills issues. Most leadership teams have never run it all the way through.
The whole world spent the week watching teams that have. The World Cup is on American soil for the first time since 1994, the quarterfinals wrapped last night, and four teams are still standing. Watch them closely and you’ll see the same thing: when the pressure spikes, they don’t invent. They run the play.
Our guys learned the other side of that lesson Monday. Belgium 4-1. Chasing the game, structure wavering, individual players feeling disconnected from the team.
A Pattern I Keep Seeing
I sat with a leadership team last quarter and looked at their issues list. Item three had been on it since January. Five months of meetings, and that issue had been discussed in most of them. Everybody had opinions. Everybody vented. The meeting ended, the issue stayed.
They weren’t avoiding it. They were discussing it to death.
That’s an expensive habit. Discussion feels like progress because it’s louder than avoidance. The issue doesn’t care. It comes back next week wearing the same shirt.
The Play (What Gino Taught Me)
The play comes from EOS, and it’s Gino Wickman’s: IDS. Identify, Discuss, Solve.
Fifteen years of running this with leadership teams has taught me where it breaks. Never at D. Teams love D. It breaks at the two ends.
Identify means naming the real issue, not the symptom everyone’s comfortable saying out loud. “Sales are behind” is a symptom. “We have the wrong person running sales and nobody wants to say it” is the issue.
Solve means the discussion ends with one owner and one next step. Not a better understanding. Not better alignment. An owner, an action, a date.
Run all three, in order, every time. That’s the whole play card.
Why This Matters in July
Q3 is two weeks old. Whatever is on your issues list right now either dies this quarter or compounds into your Q4, your annual planning, and your January. Issues don’t die of old age. Somebody kills them.
I’m running three quarterly sessions with client teams this week. Same play, three rooms. The teams that treat issue-solving as a play to run, instead of a conversation to have, walk out of those rooms more confident. Every time.
When the Issue Is Too Big for One Snap
Some issues won’t die in one play. They’re too big, too tangled, too political. Teams bounce off them for quarters at a time, and the issue survives by staying big.
That’s what my Issue Atomizer is for. It splits the monster issue into atoms, and keeps splitting, until every piece is small enough to have one owner and one next step. Big issues feel unsolvable right up until they’re twelve small ones.
No issue survives the play.
Your Semifinal-Week Gut Check
Three questions before the semis kick off Tuesday:
- What’s the oldest issue on your list, and how many times has your team discussed it without killing it?
- In your last leadership meeting, did the biggest issue end with an owner and a next step, or just more talk?
- The four teams still playing all run their play when the stakes are highest. When your next big issue hits, does your team have a play, or just a huddle?
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