DailyKaizen

A couple months ago we had a consultant that came to the organization and taught us some of the tools and thinking behind Strategy Deployment (Hoshin Planning).  One of the key success factors he talked about was the ability to get leadership to the point where they no longer were “talking Ford talk.”  In other words, getting leadership to be honest and upfront about the problems they are facing, the business conditions they are dealing with and their own departmental weaknesses.  Its all about treating problems like they are gold so you can actually do something about them.

In the Model Line we have been working to learn this thinking and to adopt these practices and I have to say it is very hard.  We have made progress, but trying to change many years of well established, functional thinking quickly is an uphill climb.  Leaders here are used to protecting their departments politically and economically.  They are used to solving problems independently and cross-functional projects are typically bogged down by lack of standard improvement and deployment processes.

So next week we are conducting an all day strategic planning session where we are going to do our best to “stop the Ford Talk.”  Over the last six months we have removed probably three years worth of work off from our one year strategic plan.  In reality, we all knew that there was no way even a fraction of the things would get done, but we always left them on the plan for some reason I cannot explain.  Some sort of confirmation I guess.  The problem is we still have far to much work to accomplish with our current levels of resources and time.  So next week we are going to challange the group to make hard choices.  For us to be successful many of the leaders will need to give up a lot of what has always been considered theirs.  It will be facinating and hard.  Stay tuned…

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