Level 10 Meeting: The Agenda, a Free Template, How to Run It, Where It Goes Wrong, and Where AI Fits

By Andreas Pettersson, Founder, Leaders ADAPT

It is Monday at 9:00. The Integrator is on a plane. Nobody else has ever run the Level 10 Meeting, so someone moves it to Thursday.

Thursday fills up. The meeting does not happen, and the issues list grows by six.

That is not a scheduling problem. That is a single point of failure you built into your week.

I have run EOS for years, first at Arcules, the company I founded and scaled to 150 people, and today at Leaders ADAPT with about 10 people. The weekly L10 is the part of the Entrepreneurial Operating System I would keep if I could keep only one. This page gives you the agenda in plain words, a template you can copy, the five ways the meeting dies, and the one place AI makes it better. It is part of our guide to AI for EOS companies.

The Level 10 Meeting agenda: a free template you can copy

The Level 10 Meeting is a weekly leadership team meeting with a fixed agenda, a fixed start time and one job: move the most important issues to a decision before the week gets away from you.

The sections and the minutes are well known, and EOS Worldwide publishes its own version. Below is ours. It adds two columns the standard agenda does not have: what to prepare before the meeting, and what AI can pre-fill.

That is 90 minutes. Start on time. End on time.

If IDS finishes early, end early. Nobody has ever complained about getting 20 minutes back.

One rule matters more than the table. The meeting happens every week, whether people are there or not. The first time you cancel because two leaders are traveling, you teach the team that the meeting is optional.

It rarely recovers from that lesson.

Who should run the Level 10 Meeting, and why rotate it?

The EOS default is that the Integrator runs the L10 meeting. I am fine with that as a default. I have also seen what happens when the Integrator cannot be at the meeting: the meeting goes with them.

So rotate who runs it. Not because the Integrator is doing a bad job. Because a meeting only one person can run depends on one calendar.

Rotation does a second thing. It cascades the skill down the organization. The manager who has facilitated the leadership L10 four times runs a far better department meeting than the one who has only sat in it. If you never rotate, the discipline stops at the leadership table.

Here is what happens when it works. The leadership team gets aligned every week on the same numbers, the same Rocks and the same three issues. You can then cut the number of 1:1s, and the frequency and length of the ones you keep, pretty heavily. Much of what used to come up in them is already settled on Monday.

The 1:1 still matters. It just stops being the place where alignment happens.

Why do Level 10 Meetings fail? Five ways they die

Most L10s are never cancelled on purpose. They fade. These are the five patterns I see most, and the fix for each.

The fifth one is the real killer. L10s fail when the Visionary or CEO does not delegate authority. No agenda protects you from that. Delegating authority is a skill, not a setting, and it is the first protocol in the 5 Minute Leader.

I have sat on both sides of it. As CEO there were several times I wanted to take an issue in a certain direction. I kept the process and let the Integrator make the decision anyway.

Not because I thought my view was wrong. Because a leadership team that watches the CEO override the process once will wait for the CEO every time after that.

A softer version shows up in healthy teams too. In a recent L10 I was part of, we stopped on a tooling question and the facilitator did not want to move on until everyone agreed. That is a consensus habit, not issue solving. Solve means one person owns the call and the rest commit.

How do you rate a Level 10 Meeting, and should AI score it too?

At the conclude, each person rates the meeting from 1 to 10. EOS teams aim for 8 or better. Anyone who scores below 8 says why in one sentence.

The weakness is obvious. People are polite. A team that is quietly tired of the meeting keeps handing it 8s.

My favourite AI implementation fixes that. We score the meeting ourselves, and then we ask AI to score it as well against all the rules of EOS and tell us what we need to do better to be more effective.

It reads the transcript and checks what a tired team stops noticing. Did we start on time. Did IDS start before minute 30. Did every to-do get an owner, and did we solve or only discuss.

Then we compare its number with ours.

The gap is the useful part. When the room says 9 and the transcript says 6, you have a real conversation to have. We published the method as scoring your meetings with AI.

Where AI fits in the Level 10 Meeting, and what stays human

AI can prepare the meeting. It cannot hold it.

What AI does well around an L10:

• Pulls the scorecard from source systems and flags the numbers that are off track.
• Collects Rock status from owners the day before and writes a one page pre-read.
• Turns the transcript into draft to-dos with owners and dates, for a human to confirm.
• Captures issues raised during the week so the list is ranked before minute 30.
• Scores the meeting against its rules, next to the team's own meeting rating.

What stays human, every Monday:

• A people call hiding inside an issue, such as whether someone is in the right seat.
• The solve in IDS: the judgment and the decision.
• The consequence when the same to-do slips for a third week.
• The Rocks the leadership team commits to for the quarter.
• The direct conversation an off track number should start.
• Anything promised to a customer, a board or a partner.

The long version of that second list is in what not to delegate to AI. The map across all six EOS components is in the AI for EOS companies guide.

L10 vs weekly business review vs 1:1: which meeting does what?

Three meetings get confused all the time.

At Arcules we ran the weekly business review of our numbers inside the L10, not as a separate meeting. The three numbers that mattered most were revenue, cost and cash position. In my view most companies under 50 people should do the same, and split out a weekly business review only when finance needs its own hour to explain variance.

If you came here looking for a weekly leadership meeting agenda rather than a numbers review, the L10 meeting agenda above is the one I would use.

What a Level 10 Meeting does not fix

The L10 surfaces problems fast. That is its gift. It does not fix the people who have to solve them.

It does not fix a leader who will not name the real issue. It does not fix a CEO who overrides the Integrator. It does not fix the leader who says on track for eight weeks while everyone in the room knows it is not.

EOS gives you the meeting. Where it is lacking is the how when it comes to leadership: how to delegate, how to make people accountable, how to run 1:1s, how to give feedback. That gap is what our leadership team development guide covers.

There is a Nordic idea I lean on here. We separate the problem from the human. The L10 is good at that, because an issue goes on a list with an owner, not a verdict on a person.

Use it that way. If you want the wider verdict on the whole system first, read our independent EOS review.

One question before you go. Who on your leadership team could run next Monday's Level 10 Meeting if you were not there? If the answer is nobody, that is your first to-do. Reply and tell me who you picked.

Common questions about level 10 meeting

What is a Level 10 Meeting?

A Level 10 Meeting, or L10, is the weekly leadership team meeting used in the Entrepreneurial Operating System. It lasts 90 minutes and follows a fixed agenda: a check in, the scorecard, the Rock review, headlines, the to-do list, 60 minutes of issue solving and a conclude. The name comes from the goal of rating each meeting close to 10.

How long is a Level 10 Meeting?

A Level 10 Meeting runs 90 minutes on the same day and at the same time every week. About 30 minutes go to the reporting sections (scorecard, Rocks, headlines and to-dos) and 60 minutes go to identifying, discussing and solving issues. Teams that keep reporting to a short on track or off track answer protect the full hour for issues.

Who should run a Level 10 Meeting?

The Integrator runs it by default in most EOS companies. Many teams rotate the facilitator so the meeting still happens when the Integrator is away and so more leaders learn to run a disciplined meeting. The facilitator keeps time and moves each issue toward a decision. The decision belongs to the issue owner and the team, not to the facilitator.

Can AI run a Level 10 Meeting?

No. AI can prepare a Level 10 Meeting: pull the scorecard, collect Rock status, draft a pre-read, capture new issues and turn the transcript into draft to-dos. It can also score the meeting against its rules next to the team's own rating. Issue solving, people decisions and the commitments made in the room remain with the leadership team.

What is the difference between an L10 and a weekly business review?

An L10 is a leadership team meeting that ends in decisions on the top issues of the week. A weekly business review is a numbers meeting that explains performance against plan. Smaller companies usually run the numbers inside the L10 scorecard. Larger companies with a finance function often hold a separate review and feed its exceptions into the L10.

Is there a free Level 10 Meeting template?

Yes. This page includes a free Level 10 Meeting template in our own wording: seven sections with minutes, the purpose of each, what to prepare and what AI can pre-fill. EOS Worldwide publishes its own agenda for companies running EOS. Any template works if the time boxes hold and every issue ends with one owner and a date.

Your next question

• The weekly KPI scorecard: what goes into the five minutes before your Rock review.
• Quarterly planning and Rocks: where the Rocks in your Level 10 Meeting come from.
• The 5 Minute Leader: the protocols for the how EOS leaves out.