Why Every Leadership Team Needs a Long-Term Issues List

Most founders I know have a complicated relationship with issues our teams are facing.

On the one hand, when team members bring issues to our meetings, it’s proof that our people are paying attention, and that’s something to be proud of. Instead of standing by, they see a problem, an obstacle, an opportunity, or an idea worth discussing, so they bring it to the rest of the team. That’s good. It means the organization is alive, learning, and processing information.

On the other hand, not every issue deserves the same level of attention or the same amount of time.

Think about the last time you were in a weekly meeting and your team had an issue that needed to be solved now. Now imagine that before you get to a resolution for that urgent issue, someone else on the team raises a deeply important question about entering a new market 18 months from now.

Is that a real issue? Absolutely. But is this the right meeting to solve it? Probably not.

That’s why issues need to be sorted into two categories: short-term and long-term. The point isn’t simply to manage time well. It’s to make sure each issue gets the kind of conversation it deserves. When we don’t make that distinction, urgent issues can consume the time strategic issues need, and strategic issues can pull us away from the executional work that needs to happen now.

Let’s explore why every leadership team needs a Long-Term Issues List, and how your team can use short-term and long-term issues to build a more productive, humane, and resilient organization.

Short-Term Issues Help You Run the Business

Short-term issues are the issues that need to be discussed and solved inside the current operating rhythm. They’re the things standing in the way of this week’s work, this quarter’s priorities, or the team’s ability to make meaningful progress. They may involve a missed commitment, a customer concern, a process that isn’t working, a Rock that needs help, or a decision that needs to be made so someone can move forward.

Short-term issues should generally be discussed and solved during your Weekly Team Meetings, while long-term issues are treated as more strategic and are typically discussed during Quarterly or Annual Planning. That distinction is simple, but it’s also powerful.

A short-term issue usually has a few characteristics:

• It affects current execution.

• The team has enough information to discuss it now.

• The right people are in the meeting to make the call.

• Solving it will help the team make progress this week or this quarter.

• The team can leave the conversation knowing who’s doing what by when.

To put it simply, short-term issues keep the business moving. And when a team gets good at solving short-term issues, meetings become more useful. People stop saving problems for side conversations over Slack or email because they know if they bring the issue to the team, they’ll talk it through together, decide what needs to happen, and move on.

But short-term issues are only one side of the equation. A leadership team that only solves what’s urgent can become very good at running the current version of the business while not giving enough attention to the company they're trying to build. That’s where long-term issues come in.

Long-Term Issues Help You Build the Business

Long-term issues aren’t any less important than short-term issues. In many cases, they’re more important. They just require a different kind of thinking.

A long-term issue might be about entering a new market, rethinking the company’s structure, evaluating a major investment, evolving the vision, or deciding whether a recurring issue points to a deeper problem. These are company-building conversations.

The challenge is that these conversations often show up at inconvenient times. Someone has an important thought during a weekly meeting. A customer comment raises a bigger strategic question. A founder senses that something about the current model won’t serve the next Stage of Development.

Just because now isn’t the right time to talk about it, doesn’t mean it isn’t important. The team needs a place to put those issues. Not in someone’s notebook. Not in the founder’s head. Somewhere that it won’t be forgotten.

A Long-Term Issues List gives these topics a real home. It tells the team, “This matters. We’re not solving it in this meeting, but we’re also not losing it.” That kind of discipline helps teams stay focused today while still making room for the bigger work ahead.

I deeply believe one of our most important jobs as founders is to help our teams process information well. Information has value when it helps us make better decisions. But information becomes much less useful when it shows up in the wrong meeting, at the wrong time, without the right context. The Long-Term Issues List protects that information until your team is ready to use it well.

If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.

Steve Jobs

A Strong BOS Helps Put the Right Work in the Right Place

This is where running your company with a well-designed business operating system, or BOS, becomes so useful.

A BOS shouldn’t make leadership more complicated. It gives teams a simple, shared way to organize the work. Weekly meetings have a purpose. Quarterly and Annual Planning have a purpose. Scorecards, Rocks, To-Dos, Headlines, and issues all have a purpose. The power comes from putting the right work in the right place.

That’s why we designed Ninety to give teams separate Short-Term and Long-Term Issues Lists. Inside Ninety, long-term issues aren’t buried in the weekly meeting flow. They’re also visible in the Vision tool, where teams document the longer-range direction of the company and prepare for Quarterly or Annual Planning. That’s important because strategic issues need a place where they can be reviewed in the context of where the company is going, not just what the team needs to solve this week.

When an issue comes up, your BOS should help your team slow down just enough to sort the issue before trying to solve it. The point isn’t to overprocess it. It’s to make sure you're putting it in the right place before spending time on it.

Your team should ask:

• What needs to be solved now?

• What needs to be captured for later?

• Who owns the next step?

• What forum gives us the best chance of making a great decision?

When everything is called urgent, the team stops treating anything as truly urgent. And when you try to tackle every issue in the same meeting, leadership conversations become less effective. A strong BOS helps you separate urgency from importance.

When issues are put in the right place, teams can make better decisions with less wasted time and effort.

How to Know Where an Issue Belongs

The distinction between short-term and long-term issues doesn’t need to be overly complex. In fact, the simpler the filter, the more likely the team is to use it.

Here’s a practical way to think about it:

• Short-term issues: These affect current execution. The team has enough information to discuss them now, the right people are in the meeting, and solving them helps the business move forward this week or this quarter.

• Long-term issues: These affect the future shape of the business. They may touch vision, structure, major priorities, future goals, or significant resource allocation. They usually need deeper context, more preparation, or a bigger strategic conversation.

It’s up to us to build a system that helps our team make progress without turning every meeting into a strategy session. That’s the work of scaling. As your company grows, more people will see more issues, raise more questions, and bring more opportunities to the table. That’s a good thing. But without a clear way to sort those issues, they can spend too much time talking about important things in the wrong moments.

The goal isn’t to shut down strategic thinking. The goal is to protect it by giving it the right time and place.

The Long-Term Issues List Is a Leadership Commitment

The longer a leadership team operates without a Long-Term Issues List, the more the future starts competing with the present. Important topics show up again and again. Strategic ideas compete with this week’s problems. And over time, we become the memory bank for too much of the organization. That’s not how great companies operate.

A Long-Term Issues List gives leadership teams a better way. It creates a shared place for the questions, ideas, opportunities, and concerns that deserve more time without pulling the team away from the work in front of them.

Perhaps most importantly, it teaches teams a powerful habit: We don’t have to solve everything right now to take it seriously.

Short-term issues help us run the business we have today. Long-term issues help us build the business we want tomorrow. A great leadership team needs both.

Great companies are built with intention. They need a clear vision, strong agreements, and a business operating system that helps people focus on the right work at the right time. That's the work we're helping teams do at Ninety. Reach out and talk with our team to see if Ninety's the right business operating system for your company.