Do your team meetings keep circling around the same problems without producing clear decisions or lasting change? In this episode, Kirk Behrendt and co-host Miranda Beeson, a dental practice coach, explain the IDS problem-solving framework and how dental teams can use it to identify root issues, discuss them efficiently, assign clear action items, and create accountability.
You’ll learn how to structure an issues list, distinguish symptoms from underlying problems, keep discussions from getting derailed, and use weekly meetings to move problems toward resolution. For a practical framework to stop recycling the same issues in your practice, listen to Episode 1095 of The Best Practices Show!
Main Takeaways:
- The IDS framework moves teams through identifying the real issue, discussing it efficiently, and solving it with documented action items.
- Team meetings should spend approximately 20% of their time addressing issues and 80% moving priorities, systems, processes, and alignment forward.
- Issues should be documented before the meeting and prioritized based on urgency and potential impact rather than addressed in the order they were added.
- A stated problem is often a symptom, so teams should identify the underlying root causes before discussing solutions.
- Productive discussion includes relevant information and different perspectives while limiting tangents, repetition, and unrelated issues.
- Every solution should define what happens next, who owns the action, when it will be completed, and how the team will know whether it worked.
- Weekly meetings provide consistent accountability and help prevent issues and unfinished action items from accumulating over several weeks.
Episode Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to solving recurring dental practice problems.
02:17 The IDS issue-solving framework from Traction.
05:21 How much meeting time should be spent on issues.
08:11IDS overview
13:52 Identify: finding the real issue behind the symptom.
20:00 Discuss: keeping issue conversations efficient and productive.
24:30 Solve: turning discussion into decisions and action.
28:59 Why weekly meetings improve accountability.
34:02 Structuring meetings so issues do not consume the agenda.
36:00 Tools and resources for implementing the process.
39:00 Closing thoughts.
Guest Bio:
Miranda Beeson has over 25 years of clinical dental hygiene, front office, practice administration, and speaking experience. She is enthusiastic about communication and loves helping others find the power that words can bring to their patient interactions and practice dynamics. As a Lead Practice Coach, she is driven to create opportunities to find value in experiences and cultivate new approaches.
Miranda graduated from Old Dominion University, and enjoys spending time with her husband, Chuck, and her children, Trent, Mallory, and Cassidy. Family time is the best time, and is often spent on a golf course, a volleyball court, or spending the day boating at the beach.
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