DailyKaizen

I will apologize in advance and let folks know that this is going to be a short post, because I still have a lot of prep work to do for a Lean session tomorrow. 

Today was a good day and a key milestone on our Lean journey.   Two months ago our Executive team committed to adopting Lean as an enterprise management system.  As a critical component of this commitment they have asked us to teach them the Strategy Deployment process as well as support the facilitation of the development of one year plans and their deployment.  Over the last two months we have worked hard to prepare for this process.  We have begun to implement leadership standard work at the executive level, we have translated targets and themes from our long term strategic plan into a deployable form and we have done a whole lot of teaching and coaching.   All of this in advance of today and the next two days where we are working with the Executive team and other key business leaders to draft Mother A3’s  (business strategies) for four focus areas of Affordability, Growth, People and Quality.   As an organization we have never been good at focusing our activities and limiting the amount of improvement work that we commit to.  Strategy Deployment provides a new way of working through this challenge, but it will still be a challenge.

Today we focused on getting the participants just in time education so they are prepared to begin developing strategies for the next two days.  In general, I think the team was both excited and overwhelmed by the challenge that will come in the near future.  Not only do they need to execute on the most ambitious strategy in our history, but they have to do it through the application of whole new way of thinking about their work and roles as leaders.   So many of the mental models they have counted on throughout their careers will need to be adjusted.  The good news is that we are all in this together.  We will take the next couple of months one step at a time and check often our progress to ensure we can adjust when needed.  I will fill you all in on the details this weekend.  Stay tuned…

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed