Hoshin Kanri / Strategy Deployment - Why Care?

12 Healthy Things Hoshin Kanri Can Do for You

“When strategies for change fail to deliver their full potential, it’s rarely the strategy itself that is at issue.”

Many of you have seen methods like Lean or Six Sigma being implemented in various organizations and industries and you know things don't always go smoothly. The methods are strong but if the effort is not well managed, there can be a lot of unnecessary pressure and stress.

Sometimes dips in operational performance make things worse before they get better. And, occasionally, things go so poorly the company continues the downward slide it may have been on when it turned to a business improvement program in the first place. Lost jobs are the result. When a company fails, or a facility closes, the employees and their families unexpectedly face hardships that may have been avoidable.

Strategy deployment methods like Hoshin Kanri can help avoid the negative effects of poorly managed change initiatives. When practically applied, Hoshin Kanri makes business improvement efforts easier to manage, less stressful, and more successful.

12 healthy things Hoshin Kanri can do for you:

• prevent and overcome resistance
• deliver cross-functional cooperation
• generate maximum input and feedback from stakeholders
• maintain group agreement
• craft a strategic tactical launch to gain immediate traction
• produce financial results early
• successfully navigate through unexpected circumstances
• “hone-in” on a precision fit for your operation in your industry
• leverage information technology to make complex change easier
• build advanced deployment capability into your organization
• sustain your hard-won gains
• repeat your success

These things guarantee solid strategies deliver full strength results in the most natural way. As a bonus, the biggest benefit may be the optimistic and hopeful viewpoint the method imparts on participants. Hoshin Kanri delivers winning results and everyone enjoys being part of a successful effort making a positive impact. This creates a desire among participants to repeat the experience by being a part of more Hoshin Kanri managed improvement efforts. When these desires are fulfilled in a natural way by allowing the method to spread ahead of a growing wave of optimism, the method becomes a healthy regimen for continuously making the business stronger.

Staying on the Winning Line

It’s Tough Out on the Track

The Indy 500 is this weekend of course. There are certainly bigger fans than me, but you don’t have to be a fanatic to find the race fascinating.

For me, at any competitive event, it's the psychology that captures my attention most. I've never been that close to the participants, but the psychology of the race must be intense. After all, there may be one driver per car, but it is a team sport and there is a lot on the line. All kinds of unpredictable stuff happens between the start and the finish. How people work together before and during the race must play a huge part in the outcome. Surely it’s an environment where cool heads and cooperation have the greatest chance of prevailing.

500 miles is a long way when you’re frequently exceeding 200 mph. Tires wear out, the car suffers from the strain, unpredictable events like crashes and rain mean everyone suddenly has to make decisions – do we pull into the pits and make changes to the car?, what changes do we make?, or do we stay on the track?

In the end, it’s all about whose on the winning line and in position to win on the final lap. It isn't easy to put yourself at the front of the pack; to keep your nose always pointed toward victory. It takes:

• the right plan
• the right preparation
• fast reactions
• cooperation
• smart adjustments along the way
• vigilance and discipline

Sounds like a job for hoshin kanri, doesn’t it?

Winning the Lean Race - "What's the Right Lean Implementation Speed?"

If accomplishment wins the race, why do we often drive at the speed of activity?

Is it because those above us can't see our true "Lean" speed? After all, business scorecard measures usually aggregate too much data to be good gauges of Lean progress over short time periods. With this fact in mind, and in the absence of a good "lean speedometer", maybe executive management interprets more activity as "moving faster".

If this is the case, how do we correct the situation? Is it managment's job to come up with the right measurement to accurately indicate Lean progress? Or is that up to a technical person in charge of the technical side of your Lean effort? Or, maybe a financial person on your "Lean" team?

If you took on the challenge to create a "Lean Implementation Speedometer" what would your design look like? Would you be able to get agreement on one, or maybe a few, simple measures? Or would you want to try-out several measures, "dashboard" style, to give a larger audience a way to help you sort out what the indicators should be? If so, what metrics would you shop-around first?

blog posting - Dashboards - Not Just for Cars

"Gaining Cultural Traction"

I saw a great posting on the Lean Blog today - How to get started with a Lean culture? The wisdom and experience displayed by the responses is excellent. If you are interested in the topic, I recommend you visit the blog and read the valuable advice given there.

When I think of the organizations I know who have made steady progress toward a Lean culture, most share a similar Lean beginning - their initial activities gained traction quickly. Here are some of the characteristics those early efforts had in common:

1) real problems were solved right away
2) initial problem solving efforts demonstrated the usefulness of Lean
3) detailed training was “point specific” to the task at hand
4) those who do the daily work participated in an authentic way
5) pre-work ensured team activities made good use of everyone’s time and knowledge
6) team leaders never dismissed concerns – instead they were treated as valuable insights and then resolved to the satisfaction of the group
7) sincere credit was given where genuine credit was due
8) if anything went wrong “after the fact”, the team circled back around and fixed the problems right away

This formula remained constant and was part of the magic that allowed positive changes to stick and accelerate the larger effort forward.