“Agile” software methodologies have many useful concepts that non-software developers can learn from. One of those is the daily “stand-up” meeting.
The core insight behind a daily stand-up is that the entire team—all stakeholders—should begin every morning by having a meeting in which everyone just goes around and lists only three things:
- What they delivered yesterday
- What they plan on delivering today
- Your blockers; that is, what is blocking you at this point from working on your work yesterday or today
And that’s it. Note that this approach has a few nuances:
- First, listing these is more or less the only thing each person mentions. In real life, there’s often some discussion of each, some back and forth, but it’s usually very limited, just a few sentences. The key is: if any issue that comes up requires more than a couple of sentences back and forth, do not discuss it during the daily stand-up but rather, the corresponding people should schedule another meeting/session just to discuss that. Those are called “break out” meetings.
- In the first two of the three things, the word “deliver” is important. Not “what you’re working on” and not “what you thought about” but what you “delivered.” That’s important because it keeps the focus and pressure on actually delivering—that is, completing—work. Here is one key: sometimes, in fact, all the time, you’re working on work that can’t be completed and delivered one day to the next. The solution? Break the deliverables up into smaller chunks. Do you have to write a 100-page paper for your boss? You can’t do that overnight, but you can have 10 pages completed or the outline, and so forth. Work can be broken down into delivered into infinitely small chunks.
- These are called “stand-up” meetings because, in theory—at least, in the pre-COVID world in which most people worked side-by-side—these meetings were designed to be conducted with everyone standing on their feet. Why? That gives you psychological pressure for everyone to want to finish the meeting as quickly as possible. And physical pressure, actually.
While the daily stand-up was designed for software developers, it is really useful in any team context. It forces the team to be aligned, creates a daily structure, and keeps the pressure there, even if “lite,” on a daily basis. And of course, it helps surface blockers—things stopping you—so everyone else can chime in on how to unblock you. Success, after all, can be defined as removing everything that is blocking you from achieving success.
