IDS (Identify, Discuss, Solve)

IDS is the three-step method EOS uses to work through issues, and it's the engine inside the weekly meeting. First Identify the real issue, digging past the symptom to the actual root cause, because most stated problems are a surface complaint hiding something deeper. Then Discuss it once, fully and honestly, sharing the information needed to decide, without circling. Finally Solve it by agreeing a concrete action with an owner and a deadline, then moving on.

The value for a lean founder is discipline against two common failures: solving the wrong problem because you never identified the real one, and discussing forever without ever deciding. IDS forces a single clean pass per issue and a tangible outcome. The hardest step is usually Identify, because teams instinctively jump to solutions for a problem nobody has actually named. Get the root cause right and the solve is often obvious.

In practice it lives wherever your issues list lives. Say you keep that list as a board in Trello: each issue is a card, and Solve means the card leaves the meeting with a named owner and a due date, not a comment thread. The Identify step is where it gets real, say a card reads "website is slow" but Microsoft Clarity session recordings show people abandoning on one broken form, so the actual issue is the form, not the whole site. And because Discuss should happen once rather than over Slack all week, recording the meeting with Fireflies.ai means the agreed action and owner are captured automatically, so nobody relitigates a solved issue next week. It pairs naturally with a prioritised issues list so you always tackle the biggest one first.