Let's Huddle!
- Tiffany Archuleta
- Mar 19
- 4 min read
What is a Huddle? You may have heard of it, you may be a huge fan, or a little skeptical. This visual management tool is a 15-minute stand-up meeting (yes, just 15 minutes!) that's used to drive accountability, align daily work with strategic goals, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. Huddles provide regular opportunities for a team to check in, share updates, and discuss challenges. Every Huddle is accompanied by a Huddle Board, which is designed to meet the needs of your team.
Creating a Rhythm of Progress
While each Huddle Board is customized to fit the exact needs of a team, it should always contain four basic elements:
The team's strategic goal they are progressing towards;
A "just do it" (JDI) tracker, which captures small innovations that an individual contributes towards achieving the larger strategic goal;
A team-wide improvements tracker towards achieving that same strategic goal; and
A celebration space!
Tools like the Huddle (along with the Huddle Board) make big goals visible, actionable and keeps teams and stakeholders throughout the organization connected.
What's on the Board?
Huddles help to create momentum and keep continuous improvement alive. They provide a space that nurtures new ideas, encourages judgment-free brainstorming, increases transparency, and creates opportunity for growth, strategic thinking, and a data-driven mindset.
Making change visible
JDI’s are a central part to most Huddles. They equip individuals to take on initiatives related to a strategic goal based on their own ideas of what they think can be improved.
Think there should be a standardized form for ordering office supplies? Take that small innovation on as a JDI!
And with a Huddle Board, all of these ideas are tracked in a common place for all to see. If someone feels inspired to tackle that JDI, they can self-assign themselves to complete it.
Change doesn’t just happen because you command it to. It takes direction, motivation, shared accountability, and accessibility. A Huddle (and its Huddle Board) delivers all of these crucial characteristics to change all in a neat, clear package.
Customized to your team and their needs
Check out some examples below of Huddle Boards that PPI has supported different organizations to set up and launch!
BART
Because Huddle Boards are completely customizable-- have some fun with it! For BART, we designed a simple visual: a BART car sticker that moves along a fantastical route around the San Francisco Bay. The goal is to complete enough JDIs to get the car around the Bay each quarter. Anytime a JDI is completed, the person or people responsible get to move the BART car down the track. This simple design element not only creates momentum, but also let's the team have some fun with it, too!
Walnut Creek
Walnut Creek used at least four separate spreadsheets to track City building projects. All that tracking was hard to access by all the different team members who needed to see it.
Now, their Huddle Board is their space to track all of the projects in one, centrally visible place and provides situational awareness to the team and leadership. It is the solution to being caught off guard by a question from Council or a community member about “what’s the deal with ___ project.” The Huddle Board is the mechanism to make this critical information visible and accessible to everyone who needs it and gives the whole team a high-level understanding of where every project is at all times.
Rohnert Park
Rohnert Park's Development Services Team wanted a way to keep the whole Dev Services team in the loop during a period of high staff turnover. One unique addition to the Rohnert Park Huddle Board was the creation of a "Spicy Topics" table. This table allowed for two-way communication about serious projects. Spicy Topics usually involved high interest from the community and, therefore, the Council. The topics were situations where the DST needed to be consistent about their messaging to be clear with the public and avoid potential legal landmines on how the situations were discussed. Frontline staff could report new questions or concerns as they came in, and leadership would update how each spicy topic should be discussed and through which channels. The Huddle Board enabled two-way communication, supported teamwork and accountability, and even took a little sting out of some stressful situations.
Why It Works
Huddles are an ideal way to test ideas quickly within teams. They create a simple, repeatable forum for gathering real-time feedback, making rapid improvements, and keeping everyone informed, whether the change is small, significant, or somewhere in between. Just as importantly, they open up two-way communication between leadership and staff, so information does not just flow top-down or get stuck in a black hole.
Each week, the team that runs the Huddle can take a few minutes to reflect:
What worked well?
What felt clunky?
What should we keep, adjust, or drop?
Leaders can support continuous improvement by encouraging staff to jot down improvement ideas on JDI forms as they think of them, and by celebrating all the wins--big and small-- towards achieving the strategic goal.
We often hear that the best part about a Huddle is that it's fast. Change can be hard, but asking for 15 minutes a week to try something new is pretty easy. Huddles create real-time and consistent exposure to a strategic goal, which lowers the barrier to participation and helps people understand how they fit into the change. Over time, even the most skeptical team members tend to come around once they see how quickly issues get surfaced and resolved, and how much smoother work can run.
Want to embed continuous improvement into your organization? We can help you set up a Huddle and build a rhythm your team can sustain.
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