Tiered Accountability Meetings: Keep the Gain Alive Months After Handover

Tiered Accountability Meetings lets you define the tiered meeting structure, tier 1 through tier 3 and beyond, that cascades issues up and decisions down through the organisation. You enter each forum, who attends, how long it runs, how often it meets, and where unresolved issues go next. The tool then shows you the structure as a single picture.

You use it in the Sustain phase of RDMAICS. By that point the control plan exists and the new method is written down. What is missing is the human machinery that notices when the method stops being followed. A control chart tells you a process drifted. A tiered meeting is where somebody looks at that chart, says so out loud, and either fixes it or passes it to a forum that can.

The reason to build it formally, rather than rely on existing meetings, is simple. Improvements decay quietly. Nobody announces the day the huddle stopped happening. A defined structure gives you something concrete to audit against three months later.

Everything below uses the sample data that loads with the tool. The case is fictional and exists to show the mechanics.

The scenario is an accounts payable improvement that has just been handed back to the line. The project team is standing down. The question is who holds the gain now. The answer is a four tier structure that starts with a ten minute team huddle and ends at an executive forum.

Four rows define it. Tier 1 is a team huddle for the AP team plus supervisor, ten minutes, daily, escalating to tier 2. Tier 2 is a value stream review for supervisors plus manager, thirty minutes, daily, escalating to tier 3. Tier 3 is site leadership for managers plus director, forty five minutes, weekly, escalating to steering. Tier 4 is the steering committee for the director plus sponsor, sixty minutes, monthly, escalating to exec.

The table takes one row per tier. Each row needs a tier label, a forum name, participants, duration, frequency and an escalation path. Tier and frequency are the required fields. The rest is what makes the structure legible to people who were not in the room when you designed it.

Name participants by role, not by person. The sample data says AP team plus supervisor and supervisors plus manager. That survives staff turnover. A list of names does not. Six months after handover the names will have changed and the roles will not.

Set duration honestly. The sample runs ten minutes at tier 1 and sixty at tier 4. Short at the front line, longer at the top, because the volume of issues narrows as it rises and the decisions get heavier. If you write ten minutes and the huddle takes thirty, you have either the wrong agenda or the wrong tier.

The escalation path is the field people skip. Do not skip it. Every row in the sample points somewhere: tier 2, tier 3, steering, exec. That chain is the whole point of the tool.

The tool summarises the structure as four meeting tiers, who attends, how long and how often each meets, and where it escalates. The headline figures are four tiers, four of four with an escalation path, two meeting daily, and a longest meeting of tier 4 steering committee at sixty minutes.

The cadence line reads: daily at tier 1 and tier 2, weekly at tier 3, monthly at tier 4, with escalation ending at exec. Read that as a clock. An issue raised in the AP huddle on a Monday morning can reach the value stream review the same day. It can reach site leadership within the week. It can reach steering within the month. That is the maximum time any single problem can sit unseen if the structure is followed.

Four of four with an escalation path is the figure to check first. A tier with no onward path is a dead end. Issues that arrive there stop. The sample has no dead ends.

Each tier also displays as its own card with forum, participants, duration, frequency and escalation path set out. The tool offers an AI review that explains the calculated output if you want a second reading of the structure.

The structure is not documentation. It is a set of commitments you can test.

It tells you where a given problem belongs. A jam in one AP queue belongs at tier 1. A resourcing conflict between two supervisors belongs at tier 2. A decision to change the process standard belongs at tier 3 or above. Without the structure, every problem goes to whoever is loudest or nearest.

It also tells you the total meeting load you are asking for. Two daily forums, one weekly, one monthly. You can show that to a manager and ask whether it is affordable. If it is not, you change it now rather than watch it collapse in week six.

Decay has a shape. The first sign is that the daily tiers become less than daily. The sample has two daily forums, tier 1 and tier 2. These are the load bearing ones. If the ten minute huddle becomes three times a week, the structure has already failed, even if tier 3 and tier 4 still run on time.

The second sign is that escalation stops moving. If nothing has come up from tier 1 to tier 2 for a month, that is not a sign of a healthy process. It is a sign that people have stopped raising things, or that the path is not being used. The structure defines four of four escalation paths. Traffic should flow along them.

The third sign is drift in duration. The forty five minute site leadership review that now runs ninety minutes is absorbing work that belongs lower down. The ten minute huddle that now runs two minutes has become a roll call.

The fourth sign is attendance drift. Participants in the sample are defined by role. When the manager stops attending tier 2 and sends nobody, the decision authority has left the room, and issues will stall there.

The most common mistake is building tiers that do not connect. People define a daily huddle and a monthly steering committee and nothing in between. Issues then have to jump three levels or die. The sample avoids this by running tier 2 daily, so there is a same day route out of the front line.

The second mistake is making the top tier too frequent. A monthly sixty minute steering committee is a serious commitment. If you set it weekly, it will be cancelled, and cancellation at the top signals to everyone below that the structure is optional.

The third mistake is defining the structure without agreeing who chairs each forum and what the standing agenda is. The tool captures cadence and participants. It does not capture discipline. That is yours to add.

The fourth mistake is treating this as a project artefact. Build it during Sustain for the people who will run it after you leave, and have them write the rows with you.

This tool records a structure. It does not make the meetings happen. Nothing in the four tiers compels a supervisor to run the huddle on a busy Tuesday.

It does not tell you whether the tiers are the right ones for your organisation. Four tiers suits the fictional case here. Your site might need three, or five. The tool will accept whatever you enter and summarise it faithfully.

It does not measure anything about performance. There are no metrics, no outcomes and no savings in the output. The figures it gives you are counts and durations drawn from your own rows. Four tiers, four escalation paths, two daily forums, sixty minutes as the longest meeting. Nothing more.

It also will not tell you whether escalated issues get resolved. The path ends at exec in the sample, but ending somewhere is not the same as being answered. You need a separate record of what went up and what came back down. Use this tool to set the skeleton, then watch the behaviour that runs through it.