L10 Meeting
An L10 meeting is a 90 minute weekly meeting format from the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) where leadership teams follow a fixed seven part agenda and spend two thirds of the time solving their highest priority issues using the IDS process.
How the L10 Meeting Works
Your leadership team meets for 90 minutes every week, and nothing about those 90 minutes is optional or improvised. The L10, short for Level 10 meeting, follows the same seven part agenda every single week. It starts with a five minute personal check in and ends with a meeting rating on a 1 to 10 scale. The name is the aspiration.
Every meeting should score a 10.
Gino Wickman introduced the L10 in his 2007 book Traction as part of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). According to EOS Worldwide, over 250,000 companies now use the framework. The L10 meeting is the system’s core weekly rhythm, the point where vision, accountability, and issue resolution converge in a repeatable structure.
What makes it different from a typical weekly sync is time allocation. The first 25 minutes cover rapid fire status checks. Personal wins, scorecard metrics, quarterly rock progress, headlines, and the to do review. Every item is reported as on track or off track. No discussion. Off track items drop to the Issues List.
Sixty of those 90 minutes go to IDS, the structured problem solving process that forces the team to name root causes before jumping to solutions. IDS stands for Identify, Discuss, Solve, and it’s where the L10 earns its reputation.
Most experienced teams finish in 60 to 75 minutes once the format is ingrained. The 90 minute block stays on the calendar as the constraint, not the target.
Meetings start on time, end on time, and happens on the same day at the same time every week. Canceling isn’t treated as an inconvenience. It’s treated as a breach of the system’s discipline.
The Seven Part L10 Agenda
Each section of the L10 agenda has a fixed time allocation that totals exactly 90 minutes. The agenda stays the same every week, which is by design. Consistency removes the friction of deciding what to discuss and forces the team to work within constraints.
Segue (5 Minutes)
Each team member shares one personal best and one professional best from the past week. This transitions the group from working in the business to working on the business. Teams that skip the segue tend to struggle with engagement for the rest of the meeting because the mental shift from operational mode to strategic mode never happens.
Scorecard Review (5 Minutes)
Five to 15 key weekly metrics, each with a single owner. One word per metric. On track or off track. No explanations, no storytelling. If a number is off track, it drops to the Issues List for IDS. The scorecard identifies problems. It doesn’t solve them.
Most teams resist this section at first, because five minutes feels impossibly short for 15 metrics. It’s supposed to feel short. If the team can’t get through the scorecard in five minutes, they either have too many metrics or they’re discussing instead of reporting.
Experienced teams auto escalate any metric that comes in off track two weeks in a row. Two consecutive misses is a pattern, not a fluke. Two consecutive misses is a pattern, not a fluke.
Rock Review (5 Minutes)
Rocks are quarterly priorities, typically 3 to 7 for the company and 1 to 3 per individual. Each rock owner reports on track or off track. Off track rocks go straight to the Issues List, same as the scorecard. No discussion. Thirty seconds per person.
Customer and Employee Headlines (5 Minutes)
Team members share notable news about customers or employees. A key client threatening to churn, a strong new hire, a recurring support complaint. Anything urgent gets added to the Issues List. Everything else is noted and moved on.
To Do List Review (5 Minutes)
Action items from the previous week get a binary check. Done or not done. There’s no partial credit and no explaining why something didn’t get completed. If a recurring to do keeps showing up as not done, it becomes an issue for IDS.
Teams running healthy L10s hit 90% or higher to do completion each week. Anything below that usually means the to dos from the previous session were too vague, too ambitious for a seven day window, or assigned without clear enough ownership.
Identify, Discuss, Solve (60 Minutes)
IDS is the engine of the meeting. The team prioritizes the Issues List by voting. If three or more people agree an issue is the top concern, it gets the first slot. If fewer than three agree, it drops and the team selects the next candidate.
Once the top three are ranked, the team works through each using the IDS process. Identify means naming the root cause, not the symptom. Discuss means exploring solutions without tangents. Solve means assigning a specific to do with one owner and a deadline, or making a decision that resolves the issue permanently.
That 60 minute allocation means roughly two thirds of the meeting is spent solving problems rather than reporting status. In most conventional leadership meetings, updates and status reports dominate the agenda and problem solving gets whatever time is left. The L10 inverts that ratio.
In practice, most teams resolve 3 to 5 issues per session depending on complexity. Teams that try to touch every issue on the list resolve none of them thoroughly.
Conclude (5 Minutes)
Recap new to dos. Confirm cascading messages, which are the decisions each leader needs to communicate to their department. Rate the meeting on a 1 to 10 scale.
Even if the team is mid discussion on an issue, the conclude starts at the 85 minute mark. Doesn’t matter how close the team is to a resolution. An unfinished issue goes back on next week’s list.
A common early failure is teams capping their scores at 8, saying there’s always room for improvement. This misunderstands the rating. A well run meeting where the top issues got solved and the agenda stayed on track should score a 10. Avoiding 10s eliminates the one signal that tells the team the format is actually working.
How IDS Drives Issue Resolution
The first 25 minutes follow a script, but IDS is where the meeting earns its name. Most leadership teams jump straight to solutions when a problem surfaces, turning a revenue miss into a sales training conversation or a product delay into a resourcing discussion. IDS forces a pause before the fix. What is the real issue underneath this symptom?
The Identify step is where discipline matters most. A missed revenue target might look like a sales execution problem, but the root cause could be a product gap, a pricing misalignment, or a hiring delay. The team names the actual issue before anyone proposes a solution.
Once the root cause is named, the conversation opens up. Open debate, one hard rule. Stay on the issue. When the discussion drifts into an adjacent problem, the facilitator calls a tangent and redirects. If a new issue surfaces, it goes on the Issues List as a separate item. The original issue stays in focus until resolved.
Every IDS round ends the same way. A specific to do with one owner and a clear deadline, or a decision that resolves the issue permanently. EOS calls this “solving it forever,” meaning the team creates a systemic fix rather than a one time workaround. The issue stays on the list until the team agrees it’s genuinely resolved.
The L10 Agenda (90 Minutes, Every Time)
The agenda is fixed and non negotiable. Segue and check in (5 minutes): each person shares one personal and one professional good news item. This brief human connection prevents the meeting from feeling purely transactional. Scorecard review (5 minutes): review the team’s 5 to 15 weekly metrics. Any metric that is off track gets dropped to the Issues List for discussion later. Rock review (5 minutes): check progress on quarterly priorities (rocks). On track or off track. Off track rocks go to the Issues List. Customer and employee headlines (5 minutes): anyone shares relevant news about customers or team members. Brief updates, no discussion.
To do list review (5 minutes): review last week’s to dos. Each is either done or not done. No explanations, no extensions. Not done items go to the Issues List. IDS (Identify, Discuss, Solve) (60 minutes): this is the core of the meeting. The team works through the Issues List starting with the most important issue. For each issue: identify the root cause (not the symptom), discuss solutions (with a strict no tangent rule), and solve by making a decision or assigning a to do. The 60 minute IDS block is what makes the L10 different from every other meeting format. Problems do not get tabled. They get solved or assigned in real time.
Conclude (5 minutes): recap to dos created during this meeting, confirm decisions, cascade messages (what needs to be communicated to the rest of the organization), and rate the meeting 1 to 10.
Why the L10 Works
Three design decisions make the L10 effective. First, the fixed time limit creates urgency. Knowing the meeting ends at exactly 90 minutes forces the team to prioritize the most important issues rather than spending 45 minutes on the first topic. Second, the IDS process prevents circular discussion. Identifying the root cause before discussing solutions stops the team from debating symptoms. Third, the meeting rating at the end creates accountability. If the team consistently rates meetings below 8, the format needs adjustment: the wrong issues are being raised, the right people are not in the room, or someone is dominating the discussion.
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How L10 Meeting Compares
Common Questions About L10 Meeting
What is an L10 meeting?
An L10 meeting, also called a Level 10 meeting, is a 90 minute weekly leadership meeting from the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). It follows a fixed seven part agenda running Segue, Scorecard, Rock Review, Headlines, To Do List, IDS, and Conclude. The name comes from the goal of rating every meeting a 10 out of 10 on effectiveness.
How long should an L10 meeting be?
Exactly 90 minutes. The format allocates specific time to each of the seven sections, with 60 minutes reserved for IDS. Some teams finish in 60 to 75 minutes, but the meeting should never exceed 90. Going longer usually means the team is discussing issues during the status sections instead of saving them for IDS.
What does IDS stand for in EOS?
IDS stands for Identify, Discuss, Solve. It is the problem solving process used during the 60 minute issue resolution block of every L10 meeting. The team identifies the root cause of an issue, discusses potential solutions without tangents, and solves it by assigning a to do with one owner and a clear deadline.
What are rocks in an L10 meeting?
Rocks are quarterly priorities, typically 3 to 7 for the company and 1 to 3 per individual. They represent the most important objectives for the next 90 days. During the rock review section of the L10, each owner reports whether their rock is on track or off track. Off track rocks move to the Issues List for discussion during IDS.
Can you run an L10 meeting without EOS?
Yes. The L10 agenda structure works independently of the full EOS framework. Many teams adopt the seven part agenda and IDS process without implementing EOS’s other tools like the Vision/Traction Organizer or Accountability Chart. The meeting format is effective on its own because the value comes from the fixed structure and time allocation, not from the broader system.
How do you rate an L10 meeting?
At the end of every L10, each participant scores the meeting on a scale of 1 to 10. A score of 8 or above means the meeting was focused, the team solved important issues, and time was used well. Scores below 8 signal that something went wrong. Common causes are discussion during status sections, tangents during IDS, and failure to address the most important issues.
What is the difference between an L10 meeting and a staff meeting?
A staff meeting typically covers announcements, status updates, and open discussion without a fixed structure. An L10 meeting compresses status into the first 25 minutes and dedicates 60 minutes to structured problem solving via IDS. The L10 also includes a meeting rating that creates accountability for meeting quality over time.