Lean Nation,
Happy Holidays to everyone! As the
holiday season unfolds, I wish everyone a prosperous and safe holiday season, and happy New year! If you have worked hard to eliminate non-value added
activity from your processes, hopefully 2013 was full of many great surprises
of improved quality, shorter lead-times, and improved productivity for your organization. If
you have yet to get started on your improvement journey, great things await you in 2014!
In my travels this December, ran
into a situation I frequently see within organizations. Many
organizations have some form of improvement capability. They have trained
personnel with some basic understanding of tools and the application of the tools. Less frequently, they might also have engaged leadership with a desire to change culture and
improve. Both of these ingredients are important to delivering sustainable
results. However most organizations are hand-cuffed because of one
critical leadership flaw. That flaw would be lack of focus.
One of the biggest problems I see in many,
many, many..... organizations is they try to accomplish way too much. Leadership
has failed to separate the many good ideas and initiatives from the critical
few. The specific lean approach to developing and deploying strategic
initiatives is known as Hoshin Kanri, also known as policy deployment or
strategy deployment. This process delivers the critical few breakthrough
objectives and provides a framework for developing, refining, deploying,
and managing the organization to the delivery of breakthrough objectives directly
derived from the strategic plan.
There are many places to research Hoshin
Kanri and several outstanding books are written on the topic. So I am not going to talk about strategy deployment in this blog. Others do a better job of speaking about the process and its benefits.
Should your
organization wish to pursue the process of Hoshin Kanri route, however, be warned. If you are not willing
to totally unwind your current strategic planning process, along with the corresponding operational and financial review processes, then I would not
take on Hoshin Kanri. If you do, you will be managing two systems and the
new one loses every single
time. There is no hybrid approach that works effectively. Either follow Hoshin Kanri standard work or don't, but being half in and half out will be ineffective
Now back to my blog content.
Specifically, the organization I was working with had several hundred
trained improvement specialists. Almost all of these personnel were part- time improvement people holding other full time jobs, but none-the-less this
group had more than enough capacity to move some big dots. As a general rule,
this multi-site organization had leadership committed to resourcing
projects.
The challenge was that the organization has
over 150 key measures to deliver improvement on. No one could articulate what the measures were, which were important, how they were measured. So each team targeted a
different measure or measures and although pockets of improvement existed, no
meaningful outcomes were generated. Why? Because there was never enough
critical mass on anyone single focus to move a big dot. The work was scattered
and diffused. Teams were fighting for the same resources like IT and
supply chain. And managers and leaders were constantly bickering over which
project was more important. All of these activities are 100% waste.
This is a self inflicted leadership wound.
I believe the single most important thing leadership can do is determine
the priorities and focus of the organization. Asking people to focus on, improve, and
report on 150 items is criminal. (By the way, the second most important think
leadership can do is hire the right people to do the work).
So the question is how many priorities should there be?
A world class organization has a total of 3-7 top level priorities. A
lean organization will typically have 5 areas of focus. These areas of
focus are directly aligned to true north measures. True north measures
point to the top level outcomes that the organization aspires to obtain that
would lead to breakthrough performance as viewed by their customers. As a
refresher, the true north measures include dimensions of Quality, Delivery, Cost, and Growth and since nothing happens without people,
another dimension, Human Development is added to the list.
The task of taking an organization from
150 areas of focus to 7 would be daunting and likely impossible in the first
attempt. Getting from 150 to 20 in the first pass might be possible and
takes the organization quite a bit closer to their goal of 5-7.
Great organizations excel and move big
dots because leadership clearly articulates and resources the critical few breakthrough strategies, provides oversight for their execution and takes quick
interventions when things go off track. This is how you directly link
team level improvement to strategy.
Lean Blessings,
Ron
Ron Bercaw
President and Sensei
Breakthrough Horizons Ltd
Shingo Award winning author
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