How to Run an IDS Session — The 60 Minutes That Actually Move the Business

The IDS section is the single most valuable hour of your leadership week. It’s also the easiest to waste.

Here’s how to run IDS so it actually solves problems — plus the AI tricks that cut a 45-minute IDS down to 10.

What IDS stands for

Identify. Get to the real issue — not the symptom. Discuss. Quickly surface the information needed to decide. Solve. Commit to a decision and an action item.

The whole point is velocity. An IDS should feel like a crisp, decisive meeting — not a debate club.

The step-by-step

1. Score and pick

At the start of IDS, the team silently scores every issue on the list 1–5 on importance. Sum the scores. Start with the highest-scoring issue.

Why: the worst IDS sessions start with the issue that was discussed most recently, not the one that matters most.

2. Identify the real issue

Before anyone talks about solutions, get to the root cause. Ask “why?” until you hit something concrete.

Surface issue: “Sales team is missing quota.” Why? “Because pipeline coverage is 2x instead of 4x.” Why? “Because SDR team isn’t hitting outbound volume.” Why? “Because they’re spending 40% of time on data entry.” Real issue: SDR time allocation + tooling problem.

If you skip this step, you’ll solve the wrong problem.

3. Discuss — but tightly

Each person speaks once, briefly. Surface facts the room needs. Avoid re-litigating things already said. The facilitator says “next” as soon as a point has been made.

Rule of thumb: if the discussion goes past 5 minutes, you’ve already gathered enough info. Move to Solve.

4. Solve with a concrete action

The output of IDS is always one of three things:

• A todo — someone owns it, it’s due within 7 days.
• A new rock — if the issue needs a quarter of work, it becomes a rock next quarter.
• A decision — “we are going to X” with no immediate action.

Capture the outcome in the meeting notes before moving on.

The 5 most common pitfalls

1. Re-identifying the same issue every week. If an issue keeps coming back, it’s usually a rock, not a todo.
2. Discussing before identifying. Sets the whole discussion down the wrong path.
3. Non-decisions. “Let’s circle back next week” is a cop-out. Decide or kick it to a rock.
4. Too many owners. One owner per action item. Others can support.
5. Not recording the decision. If it’s not written down, it didn’t happen.

The AI shortcut

Rally10’s IDS panel does something new: when you click “AI analyze” on an issue, it reads the team’s last 10 issues, recent rocks, and scorecard trends, and proposes:

• Root causes (ranked by probability)
• Discuss questions the team should ask
• Candidate solutions with tradeoffs
• Action items with suggested owner seats

The team still decides. But instead of spending 20 minutes getting everyone up to speed and 15 minutes on root cause, you walk into the discussion with a starting point. Teams using it report IDS sessions that used to take 45 minutes now take 10 — and reach better decisions.

Try it free for 90 days — full EOS quarter, every feature including IDS AI, no credit card.