This coming Sunday afternoon, an estimated 100 million people will watch Super Bowl LVI between the AFC champion Kansas City Chiefs and the NFC champion Philadelphia Eagles. If you happen to be one of those 100 million individuals, you will undoubtedly notice that almost before every play, the teams (usually the offense) will huddle before coming to the line of scrimmage. Teams will use the huddle to celebrate what happened on the last play and strategize about the next one.
As I have discussed in the past, huddles are not just used by football teams (see in particular "The morning huddle" and "Before I make a mistake..."). Restaurants use them at the beginning of a shift - usually the chef meets with the wait staff to go over the nightly specials, any VIP guests coming in, etc. As I mentioned in one post, supermarkets and retail stores also "huddle up" at the beginning of the day. Several hospitals now utilize a daily operations brief or daily safety brief at least once per day (the Cleveland Clinic pioneered the use of a tiered huddle system - basically several huddles scaling up throughout the organization). All of these are great examples of the use of huddles to improve communication, improve situation awareness, develop a shared mental model, and align on a specific operational plan.
High reliability organizations (HROs) frequently use tiered huddles and daily safety briefs, but they also leverage huddles similar to how football teams use them. Trauma resuscitation teams often huddle together before an expected patient arrives in the emergency department. Similarly, neonatal delivery room resuscitation teams and/or "Code Blue" teams do as well. These kinds of huddles are a great opportunity for teams (especially so-called the swift action teams that I mentioned in my post "Who is Will someone?") to take a pause, align on a shared mental model, and formulate a plan of action. Huddles aren't just for football teams!
Agreed !
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