Show Notes: Inside the 90™ Episode #19
Part one of this L10 series covered how to run a great meeting. Part two goes structural: what it actually takes to get every team in an organization running one.
Jami and Andrew work through the common rollout snags, how to structure L10s around real org charts, and why the work never really finishes.
Vision Top-Down, Business Bottom-Up
Leadership casts the vision from the top, but the business actually runs bottom-up, through the issues list.
Every employee gets a weekly chance to surface what's standing between the team and the vision that's been cast. That's the mechanism that makes the whole system move.
Counterintuitively, the strongest execution usually isn't at the leadership level. Department-level rocks often get completed at a higher rate than leadership rocks, and department scorecards often stay more on track.
A players want equal accountability. When accountability only sits at the top, good team members notice the gap and get frustrated. Extend it to everyone, and the whole team starts embracing it together.
Rolling Out L10s: Common Snags and the Right Mindset
The same handful of challenges shows up almost every time a company tries to extend L10s past the leadership team.
Field teams: HVAC technicians, electricians, and sales reps on the road all raise a real logistical question of how to physically get a team together.
Competing methodology: a software team already running Agile needs a way to fold L10 principles in rather than replace what's working.
Fear of bureaucracy: teams worry that adding a scorecard turns people into a number instead of a person.
EOS is caught, not taught — the goal isn't pushing the system down onto a team, it's pulling them into it, so they end up wanting to grab hold of it themselves.
In practice, the sequencing matters. The leadership team should run its own L10 for a full quarter first, with every leader getting a turn facilitating, before rolling anything out further.
The wider organization gets introduced in stages too: an early heads-up that EOS is happening, then a company meeting to introduce the foundational tools once the V/TO is built and the leadership team has been running on it for a while.
Structuring L10s Around the Accountability Chart and Issues List
The accountability chart shows which teams need an L10. The issues list shows who actually needs to be in the room.
The purest version has one L10 per function on the accountability chart. Real organizations rarely stay that clean — a leader can sit in multiple seats, or a team member's issues span two different teams.
A useful test: think about where each type of issue naturally needs to land, and let that shape which team owns which L10.
Some roles end up with a home team where their rocks and scorecard live, but rotate into other L10s on a cycle when their issues touch multiple teams — an estimator on a 160-person electrical contractor's team, for instance, catching their home L10 every third week while sitting in on two others.
The same pattern shows up with a manufacturing maintenance manager who bounces between the production meeting and the maintenance meeting, depending on which issues are active that week.
For teams already running something like Agile, the better move is merging principles rather than keeping two operating systems side by side — one L10 for the dev team, still with scorecards, rocks, and an issues list, just built around Agile's existing rhythm.
On cadence, weekly beats every other week. Miss one biweekly meeting and a team effectively goes two months without a checkpoint — better to merge an existing weekly meeting with L10 principles than stretch the interval.
Keeping Every Voice Heard and Every Issue Objective
A good issues list only works if the loudest voice in the room isn't the only one getting solved for.
Before assuming it's a facilitation problem, it's worth checking team health and each person's core-value and GWC fit first — sometimes an imbalance points to something deeper than who talks the most.
If it really is just a volume issue, a facilitator can call on quieter members directly rather than let the list run popcorn-style, and a rating system — flagging an issue as one you'd like addressed this week if time allows — helps surface what might otherwise get talked over.
When someone brings a complaint about a colleague instead of raising it as an issue, the right response is simple: are you going to tell them, or am I?
That question keeps issues objective. An issue is an issue, not a judgment of the person, and treating it that way is what keeps the list a place to solve problems rather than air grievances.
Scaling Up: Cascading Issues and the Visionary–Integrator Split
As L10s multiply across an organization, issues start flowing between them, and that flow is what keeps everything aligned.
A team can push an issue up a level or down a level when it belongs somewhere else, which means most people end up sitting in one L10 above their own and one below at any given time.
Field and deskless teams can run on the same principles without a 90-minute conference room meeting. A construction superintendent can check in on-budget, on-time, and safety measurables weekly, keep a site board for issues as they come up, and run a quick IDS on the spot.
Once teams see that raising something actually gets it seen and prioritized, buy-in tends to show up faster than leaders expect — running EOS only at the leadership level, by contrast, is what tends to create an us-versus-them culture.
At scale, the integrator owns execution — are L10s happening, are scorecards accurate, are rocks and to-dos getting done. The visionary owns something different: staying obsessed with the tools themselves, since the visionary is usually the one who sets the culture around whether EOS is actually how the business runs.
Final Takeaway: This Work Never Finishes
L10s are never "done." Getting to 80% strong across all the tools is the target, and even then something will slip and need attention again.
The advice for anyone stuck on where to start is the same one this show is named for: draft a structure, commit to it for 90 days, then reassess — and lean on a local implementer for the nuances that come up along the way.
Vision moves top-down. The business runs bottom-up. The rhythm is what holds the two together.
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