A core challenge of management is to ensure that the organization’s priorities, strategies, and metrics are consistently embraced and that any impediments are identified and addressed quickly. At Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare, ensuring the alignment of all these things to provide extraordinary care requires a constant regimented focus across our 23 hospitals, 170 clinics, and 850,000-member health insurance plan. To achieve that, we have implemented a model of daily huddles on an extensive scale. In this article, I’d like to share the insights we’ve gleaned from the model’s first full year of operation, which hopefully organizations in health care and many other industries will find useful.
The model has been used in other industries and has parallels to the “teams of teams” approach in the agile method of operating that has become so popular. But the scale at Intermountain Healthcare, where more than 2,500 huddles occur every morning, makes it especially illuminating and instructive.
At Intermountain, the 15-minute huddle is the key. It enables knowledge from activities throughout the organization in the previous 24 hours to escalate up to executive leadership — Tier VI in our model — and be addressed.
Read the full article on Harvard Business Review
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