DailyKaizen

Over the last couple of months I have found myself in the position of facilitating several planning and deployment events.  Like most organizations we have many challenges when it comes to focus, coordination of resources and keeping alignment across silos.  In the past during planning events we have used many different frameworks to try and gain alignment, but none as effective as STP (Situation, Target, Proposal).  I was taught STP about six months ago by one of our Sensei and I have continued to use it with success ever since and thought it might be useful to share with the readers of this blog.

The STP framework and process is very simple which makes it easy to explain and to learn.  The premise behind STP is that if a group of leaders is given the same situational information and they agree to the same targets then coming up with proposals should be simple.  In other words, the root cause behind disagreement on solutions (proposals) is typically a lack of understanding on the current situation or a lack of alignment around what the targets should be.   In my experience thus far I have found that in most cases leaders that disagree do not have a common understanding of the current state, thus they jump to solutions about what the future state should be.

By using STP it helps the consultant begin to make visible the root cause behind mis-alignment and then take countermeasures to ensure that leaders can gain agreement in the future.  During my last event it became very obvious that some of the support service leaders did not have a good understanding of the situational information relating to the production system, thus they had a different solution then the operations teams.  In this case, both groups had agreed on the same targets, but could not come to the same agreement on the methods to achieve them.  In the past it may have been hard for me to see where the mis-alignment was coming from and I may have addressed a symptom of the problem as opposed to the real problem itself.   As a countermeasure in this example we were able to beef up our current state information as well as bring one of the leaders to the Gemba.

For those of you that find yourself struggling to gain alignment I would highly recommend this method.

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed