The action: Start the day by gathering everyone around, and checking the pulse by asking how we are doing on our goals, and how we can help each other during the day.

The long form: In the whirlwind of everyday activities it’s easy to go into what Dan Heath in Upstream refers to as tunneling mode. People have too much on their plates, and are simply not able to step back and try to solve the root causes of the problem – by “going upstream”.

One set of habits I learned from lean-coach Magnus Lord, is to create a rhythm of both daily pulse meetings and a weekly improvement meeting.

During the daily pulse meeting you gather the team around a visual scoreboard for five minutes with your 1-3 improvement goals, and ask (looking back), “How did we do on these yesterday?”

Say you didn’t meet the goal of expected waiting times, you make a quick note of the preliminary root cause, and pick it up in the weekly improvement meeting (f40). You don’t solve anything now, but you are surfacing problems and committing to solving them later.

Then you ask (looking forward), “What is stopping us from achieving our goals today?”

Perhaps a team member mentions that they are overburdened today, so here is an opportunity to redistribute the work. This creates transparency and helps you work as a team.

Note: This will not necessarily apply to all kinds of teams. We used this in veterinary practices, where work was accomplished as a group. If your work is more individual you may have to adapt the method.