Huddle library → The five-minute round
Recurring · five minutes
The five-minute round
Five minutes, one question, everyone answers, no cross-talk: "what got you through this week?"
How to run it
- One question, asked the same way every time. Changing it weekly turns it into a game nobody prepares for.
- Everyone answers, including you, including the float, including whoever walked in late.
- No cross-talk. No responding, no fixing, no "oh that happened to me too." The no-cross-talk rule is the entire mechanism — it is what makes a short answer safe.
- Five minutes, timed, and you stop at five even if two people have not spoken. It runs again next week.
Why it scales
A team of four gets a real conversation. A team of forty gets forty six-word answers, which sounds thin and is not: the point is that every person in the room says one thing out loud and hears thirty-nine others do the same. That is the whole intervention.
Other questions that work
- "What's one thing that went right this week?"
- "What's something you're looking forward to that has nothing to do with here?"
- "Who helped you this week?" — the only one of these that reliably changes behavior on the unit.
What not to ask
Anything that invites a disclosure the person cannot take back in front of their manager. "How are you coping?" is a question for a friend, not a round.