Few organizations suffer from a shortage of priorities, suggests Dr. Mohamed Saleh. “But they do suffer from having too many priorities … sometimes using the same people, the same time, using the same resources.”

“That's really the problem that that we're trying to solve here, is that if everything is important, nothing truly is important.”

Thus launches the latest episode of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement, hosted by Saleh and John Dyer. In this installment, the two discuss the lean tool hoshin kanri (sometimes called strategy deployment or policy deployment)—which aims to wrangle this conundrum into a plan the entire organization can get behind—and the key role alignment plays in making hoshin kanri successful.

Hoshin kanri creates alignment by limiting priorities, involving employees in shaping direction, and coordinating work across functions.

What Is Hoshin Kanri?

Saleh describes hoshin kanri as a means to translate an organization’s long-term (typically three to five years) breakthrough objectives into annual priorities, site and functional level contributions, and improvement project teams. Once sustained and executed, the work moves its way into a daily management system.

“Alignment is the behavior that makes all of this work,” he notes.

He discusses hoshin kanri’s “catchball” process, which brings middle management and often front-line workers into the discussion about their contributions to meeting priorities, and points out that the catchball process is both vertical and horizontal in nature.

Dyer offers what he calls a slightly different approach to strategy deployment, one that he breaks down into four components: mission, vision, strategy and values.

“Where this might be a little different is that in order for a vision to take hold, two things have to happen. First, you have to take this idea of where we want to go, because at that point it's just undefined cloud, if you will, and take that and communicate that all throughout the entire organization, and get feedback from the rest of the organization to say, ‘Do you support this vision? Do you support where we're going? What are your thoughts on this?’ Now, why that step is so critically important is that that starts to develop buy-in to where we're going, and that's where the alignment comes in,” Dyer says.

“Once you have that vision locked up, now that's where strategy comes in, and that … is taking that three- to five-year vision and turning it into, ‘What are the concrete action items that we need to do in order to make that vision a reality?’ and break it into … what do we need to do this month, what do we need to do this quarter, what do we need to do this year in order to move the ball towards that vision?”

When Hoshin Planning Fails

Absent alignment among levels and functions within an organization, a lot can go wrong with strategy deployment. In this episode, the podcast hosts dip into their years of experience to share several warning signs of trouble, coupled with stark examples. The signs include:

• Having too many priorities.
• Letting unplanned projects hijack resources.
• Relabeling existing projects as strategy
• Cascading goals without meaningful discussion
• Mixing up your “performance” engine and your “growth” engine
• Failing to address horizontal alignment

Success requires a team effort, Dyer concludes. “We're talking about alignment, and that's critically important,” Dyer says.