The Focus of Hoshin: How Strategy Deployment Need To Change

The article (link below) by Jim Womack on “The Cascade of Hoshin” gives us a strong insight into why most Continuous Improvement (CI) programs like Lean are doomed to fail. All it takes is a little thinking and logic. Let’s go through it.

Most organizations are starting at a CI process that starts from a zero (or worse, a negative number generated by a failed attempt to restart) Kaizen mindset. Like Womack, they expect a strategy deployment to cascade down an organization and succeed, which is practically impossible. A strategy deployment starting from zero will have minimal support in a conflicted environment with few precious resources, and weak overall knowledge will not succeed in a North American (NA) business model.

Short-term success? Absolutely. The mandates of an enthusiastic leader will drive this. Long-term strategy deployment, however, will fail.

Observing a mature hoisin planning process at Toyota is almost counterproductive. NA businesses are not Japanese, and businesses here value profits and rapid improvement. The mindset should be understanding and leveraging the environment to generate similar or better organizational results.

Fight this thinking and logic all you will, but ultimately, we have a stark realization. We are not in Japan. We are not in the Toyota cult —“like” culture. Their process started with a devastated economy that drove change in the consent-oriented Japanese environment to the point that it became so mature over 70 years that its powerful Kaizen mindset is not challenged.

It’s great to rail against the storm and say, “Companies should be like Toyota!” But if we do this, we will only see failure, hoarse voices, and poor results.

I think we can agree that the chances of success are few and far between in the long term.

If we understand the problems that need solutions, we can look at opposites. The implementation mandate and resources must be focused, not diluted. The need for rapid improvement means that the focus should be on the process with the highest potential for improvement—the bottleneck. The profit mindset should be used, not a Cost reduction and efficiency paradigm.

The solution lies in the Theory of Constraints, especially the Throughput Improvement Process (TIP). TIP’s objective is to increase the production rate with no capital spending while attaining world-best quality and reducing the number of workers required on the line

Huh. That sounds familiar.

Perhaps it’s not a matter of being “Addicted to Hopium” – hoping that someday, but by some miracle, the entire North American business culture will change to our way of thinking.

Toyota does not fear us observing or using the Toyota Production System, knowing we will attempt to observe and copy rather than learn, think, and use logic.

The constant failure and fatigue of CI processes leave problems unresolved and their inherent chaotic environment in place. We must face the daunting realization that we have no practical expectation that it will change in the next three to five years. At the same time, we understand the unlimited value of CI processes like TOC and Lean.

Do I expect everyone to see this current state, the expectation that it will not change, and the value that comes from our collective improvement mindset and results? No. Of course not. Do I expect a host of CI experts to book an appointment to learn how the TIP processes succeeded? ?Will Jim Womack, the father of this thinking, see a reason to change? Nope. I understand that human nature doesn’t work that way.

Too many people accept the current thinking without question. But a few brave souls who have been emotionally unsettled by this logic will seek to be part of a new solution.

These are the people I want to talk to.

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Womack’s article is here https://www.lean.org/the-lean-post/articles/the-cascade-of-hoshin/

To find out more about the book Addicted to Hopium, please go to Amazon