What Is Your Huddle Board Really Telling You??
- Didier Rabino
- Apr 16
- 7 min read
Didier's Question of the Day: "What Insights Does Your Huddle Board Provide About the Strength of Your Daily Management System and Its Alignment with Operational Excellence Principles?"
Introduction:
In many organizations striving for operational excellence, the huddle board is a deceptively simple but powerful visual tool. On the surface, it's just a board with charts, metrics, and tasks. But when used with purpose and discipline, it becomes a window into the health of the daily management system (DMS) and a reflection of the organization's adherence to the principles of operational excellence.
The core question, "What insights does your huddle board provide about the strength of your daily management system and how well it fosters system-driven behaviors aligned with the principles of operational excellence?" invites us to examine more than just the visuals on the board. It challenges leaders and teams to explore the behaviors, routines, and thought processes that surround it. In this post, we will unpack this question in detail, exploring the essential roles huddle boards play, the types of insights they reveal, and the steps leaders can take to ensure they are using them to foster truly excellent systems.
1. The Huddle Board as a Window into Daily Management
The huddle board is not an end in itself. It is a tool — one piece in a larger system that supports daily execution, rapid problem identification, team alignment, and leader coaching.
When used effectively, a huddle board may help teams to:
Clarify the alignment of the mission and improvement goals of the team to the organization’s mission, vision, and annual goals.
Reflect on the prior day’s performance
Expose causes of performance gaps
Follow up on problem-solving to eliminate the main issues
Plan for a successful day
Ensure all the resources are available to meet today’s customer demand
Manage the development of the team members’ skills
Define the improvement plan to achieve the improvement goals
Track progress toward the improvement goals
Escalate issues that cannot be solved at their level
Celebrate wins and reinforce standards
The visual nature of a huddle board makes it an accessible touchpoint for any observer to understand what matters to the team, how they are performing, and what they are learning. It brings to life the first principle of operational excellence: "Respect every individual." By giving every team member access to shared knowledge and the opportunity to contribute, the board enables distributed problem-solving and shared accountability.
2. What Makes a Huddle Board Reflect System Strength?
To determine whether a huddle board reflects a strong DMS, we must look for certain signs. Here are five indicators that the board is functioning as part of a healthy system:
a. Visual Clarity and Simplicity The most effective huddle boards are clean, focused, and standardized. They show key metrics in a way that allows instant recognition: Are we meeting the commitments made to our customers or not? Are our processes improving or degrading? The information is presented in binary (yes/no or red/green) formats when possible, eliminating the need for long explanations.
b. Real-Time Relevance A strong board reflects today’s challenges and wins. It's updated daily or even more frequently, and it changes in response to team feedback and shifting conditions. Metrics aren’t historical artifacts; they are actionable indicators.
c. Problem Visibility: Good boards show where problems are occurring and what actions are being taken. You should see visual cues (e.g., tags, notes, cards) that indicate issues identified, contained, solved, and potentially escalated. This is critical to fostering system-driven behaviors: making problems visible and treating escalation as a sign of strength, not weakness.
d. Follow-through and Learning Boards should include evidence of follow-up on prior issues. If problems are tracked but never resolved, the board becomes a ritual with no muscle. Strong boards show not only what problems were escalated, but what was learned and how the process changed as a result.
e. Team Engagement The board should invite participation from the whole team. Everyone should be able to explain at least part of what is being displayed. When this is happening, we know that the board is not just a management communication tool but a team alignment mechanism.
3. Aligning System Behaviors with Operational Excellence Principles
Operational excellence is not a set of tools or programs; it is a set of principles that guide behavior (see Shingo Model™). These include:
Respect for every individual
Lead with humility
Seek perfection
Assure quality at the source
Flow and pull value
Think systemically
Embrace scientific thinking
Focus on the process
Create constancy of purpose
Create value for the customer
A huddle board and the routines around it can support or violate these principles. Let’s explore how each one might be reflected in the behaviors associated with huddle board use:
Respect for Every Individual: The board gives voice to every team member. It makes information transparent and supports peer accountability. When teams are invited to contribute to what is measured and how problems are defined, this principle is fulfilled.
Lead with Humility: Leaders who use the board to ask questions rather than give answers demonstrate humility. Instead of dictating solutions, they coach, support, and learn from their teams.
Seek Perfection: The board supports continuous improvement. Metrics are not just about hitting targets but about learning and closing gaps. Problem-solving routines are built into the board's use.
Assure Quality at the Source: When the board surfaces defects or quality issues daily, and actions are taken immediately to contain and solve them, the principle of quality at the source is reinforced.
Flow and Pull Value: Boards that track flow, adherence to takt time or planned cycle time, inventory, and work-in-progress, help the team stay focused on value delivery and reduce waste.
Think Systemically: The board should connect to upstream and downstream processes, and escalation routines should show how one team’s problem is part of a broader system issue.
Embrace Scientific Thinking: The presence of problem statements, countermeasures, and follow-up metrics supports experimentation and learning. It shows that problems are hypotheses to be tested, not just obstacles to be removed.
Focus on Process: Rather than blaming people, the board should encourage analysis of the process. When teams use the board to look for process variation or breakdowns, they reinforce this principle.
Create Constancy of Purpose: Boards help maintain focus on the mission of the department and its contribution to the organization’s mission and vision. The artifacts remind teams what matters and how today’s work supports the broader mission.
Create Value for the Customer: Ultimately, every metric and every problem addressed should be connected to delivering value. Boards that keep customer experience at the center create alignment with this principle. The ideal condition is to eliminate every broken promise to the customer and every stakeholder (i.e., employees with safety, and the organization itself with fiscal responsibility)
4. Using the Board to Develop Capability
One of the most powerful uses of the huddle board is to build team and leadership capability. The board is a teaching tool. Leaders can use it to:
Coach team members on how to spot problems
Practice root cause analysis
Model effective escalation
Reinforce process and leader standard work
Celebrate disciplined problem-solving
This development of capability happens in real time. The leader doesn’t wait for a classroom session. Every huddle is a mini workshop in systems thinking, lean leadership, and operational discipline.
The best leaders use questions to drive this development. For example:
"What is the goal for this customer delivery metric?"
"What is our current performance?"
"What is the primary cause for the process failing to meet the goal?
“What experiment did we conduct to eliminate this cause, and what did we learn?"
"What should we try next, and what do we expect from this experiment?"
5. Diagnosing System Weakness Through the Board
Just as a strong huddle board reflects a strong system, a weak board reveals system gaps.
Here are some red flags:
The board is out of date or rarely updated.
Metrics are not connected to the customer requirements
Artifacts on the boards are not understood by the team.
Problems are hidden or never followed up.
Escalation is avoided or punished.
The board is used only by managers.
There is no connection between what is on the board and what the team is doing.
When these signs appear, leaders must take a closer look. Are leaders teaching and coaching? Are expectations clear? Are the conditions in place to provide psychological safety to surface bad news? Would the team clap or yell if the board was removed?
Addressing these issues is not just about fixing the board. It requires leaders to look at their own behaviors, team norms, and system design. The board is a reflection, not the root.
6. Making the Invisible Visible
One of the greatest values of a huddle board is that it brings visibility to what might otherwise be invisible: the status of the system, the discipline of execution, the presence of problems, and the level of team engagement. It acts as a real-time dashboard not just for results, but for behaviors and routines.
But for this to work, the board must be integrated into a larger rhythm of daily management. It must be supported by tiered escalation, leader standard work, and coaching routines. Otherwise, it becomes an empty ritual.
When the board is truly integrated, it becomes a daily exercise in aligning action with values and mission. It is where routines become habits and principles develop into the organization’s DNA.
Conclusion: Elevating the Right Insights
So, what insights does your huddle board provide? If you stand in front of it today, what do you learn about your system, your culture, your leadership?
Does it:
Reveal the real-time status of performance to meet customer needs?
Show you where the support is needed?
Demonstrate team thinking and problem-solving?
Reflect adherence to the principles of organizational excellence?
Provide evidence of continuous learning?
If the answer is yes, your huddle board is doing more than tracking metrics. It is shaping behaviors, building capability, and sustaining excellence.
If not, now is the perfect time to reflect. Ask your team what they see. Ask yourself what you reinforce. And return to the original question:
"What insights does your huddle board provide about the strength of your daily management system and how well it fosters system-driven behaviors aligned with the principles of operational excellence?"
The answers are there. We just have to look — and listen — closely.
Next Steps:
Want help strengthening your daily management routines or evaluating your huddle board? Let’s connect. Daily systems are the heartbeat of operational excellence — let’s make sure yours is healthy, responsive, and strong.
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