Daily Huddle
Definition
A daily huddle is a short standing meeting — typically five to fifteen minutes at the same time every day — built on a fixed three-part agenda: what is happening today, the day's key number, and where anyone is stuck. Popularized by Verne Harnish as one of the Rockefeller Habits, it exists so that a blocker surfaces within a day rather than waiting for the next weekly meeting.
The agenda is fixed so the meeting cannot expand. Each person gives a one-line update, the team looks at one or two numbers, and then names anything blocking them. Nothing is solved in the room: a stuck goes to a named person who picks it up immediately afterwards. Huddles usually cascade — the executive team at 8:15, departments at 8:30, so information moves down and back up the same morning. The hard stop matters more than the start time, and most teams stand up precisely to keep it.
Huddles decay into status round-robins. When everyone reports and nobody is stuck, the meeting has stopped doing the work it was designed for — and a full week of huddles with no stucks usually says more about whether people feel able to name them than about how the week is actually going.
Example
A 40-person agency huddles at 8:45 with a nine-minute hard stop: cash collected yesterday, jobs at risk this week, stucks. Across one quarter the average was seven minutes, with roughly two issues escalated to the leadership huddle per week.
See also: leadership meeting software