#Hoshin Kanri – how does it work?
How do we agree, set and manage our direction for 2024 and onwards, in other words Hoshin Kanri?
How do we agree, and manage long term goals with day-to-day operations?
What Hoshin Kanri is not is a trendy substitute for MBO management by objectives.
Hoshin Kanri is all about agreeing where we want to be and how we want to travel along the road map.
You need rainbow approach?
There are some key steps, choices and decisions to be made.
If you are doing strategic planning for the first time perhaps a Hoshin Kanri Lite method might best suit you.
Many organisations launch around now into their policy deployment only to find during the year, things are not working to plan and the #HK is a bit of a pain in the but Leadership, at all levels has three tasks, and Hoshin Kanri should be seen as an alignment to these tasks.
What are they ?
- Set the direction – where are we going and what do we want to achieve
- Provide the resources – people, systems, materials, machines.
- Perform daily management in supporting the delivery of the goals: genba, coaching development, KPI, process improvement and above all else habits improvement.
Key to a successful lean transformation is the culture. Get the culture wrong and you will end up with managing or controlling by objectives.
The establishment of the 7 steps also requires a healthy andon culture, nemawashi with its sister catchball and a mature and healthy values based culture. Yokoten and Hansei. All these and a few more principles, policies and tools are needed for a healthy delivery of the strategy such as mendoumi and the right communication.
The most successful Policy deployment is achieved by a mature, engaging and open lean transition of building a lean problem solving culture.
What Hoshin Kanri is not:
An Excel sheet with boxes nicely completed but poorly executed.
A silo mentality, meaning we are one culture but really there is little alignment between #teams.
Setting #KPI and then throwing yourself at execution of the goals.
It is not another let’s do HK because its fashionable right now and we can show case ourselves as up there with the best.
Without daily management and minimum job role you will struggle with your HK.
Hoshin Kanri is a growth strategy at the personal, team and organisational level. It needs time, lots of PDCA and small steps all aiming for the same direction. It requires a team effort across and up and down at all levels.
We need to learn to row all together takt in the same direction.
It is, an alignment of the tps two wheel concept. Business excellence through people development working on problem solving in the right cultural environment.
It must include the collective effort of achieving the #leading indicators of #engagement self-reliance and problem solving skills.
Which will give you your ebita, volumes, quality, delivery, safety operating and ratio as lagging indicators.
Extract from my book ‘Leading to Serve‘.
