Category: Tiered Huddles

At Kaas Tailored, we have various huddles that meet daily to walk through our “information factory.” There are a variety of tools to choose from to help organize daily huddles, but we use Trello and Zoom. I participate in a huddle every day at 7:30. We all call in from wherever we are in the world. When I say “we all,” I mean all the responsible parties over our entire organization. We could not have successful huddles if we left out a section of our organization. So there are 11 leaders on the call every day.

First off, what is a huddle? A huddle is a meeting of all the necessary people in a particular system that happens daily, weekly, or monthly to remove blocks and keep information flowing. It’s sometimes hard to see how people get blocked from creating value or working in flow. Things like the 7 Wastes get in the way of flow. It’s easy to look at the flow of a piece of furniture and see what can block it. It’s harder to identify what stops flow for team members. The whole purpose of a huddle is to ensure that value creation never stops.

The answer is the lowest number of people possible while ensuring work never gets blocked. Another way of saying that is the lowest number of people while ensuring someone can always answer the question, from end-to-end. End-to-end thinking allows you to think of everything from the moment the customer has an idea to the moment the product gets delivered.

In this post, our friend Jamie Bergman, a member of the Continuous Improvement team at Nordstrom, shares how Nordstrom adopted Daily Huddles early on in their journey with Lean and where they are today.