Organisational Alignment — How do you connect strategy to the work?
Tammy Martin
March 7, 2022
Connecting the strategy to the work — Choose your method and own it end to end.
The Obeya room or lean portfolio kanban
Obeya translates to “Large Room” in Japanese.
The Obeya room was created in the 1990’s for the creation of the Toyota Prius.
During the product and process development of the prius, all individuals involved in planning would meet in the “obeya room” to align decision-making, communication and delivery around the product. The data and thinking that happens in the obeya room is transparent and available to all.
A lot of organisations have adopted the lean portfolio kanban which is another way of achieving transparency of in-flight work and delivery flow, dependency and risk mapping and capacity.
One thing we needed to learn quickly when the pandemic hit was how to create the obeya room remotely. Although it’s more of a fun collaborative vibe in a physical room with people sharing and communicating face to face, the skills learned to pull it off remotely are invaluable.
1960 Japan — a look inside a Toyota factory where the prius was assembled.
A look inside a Toyota factory 2021 — A car is assembled on the production line within 2 minutes, there are 2 measures for the assembly time, build time and takt time. The takt time is the tick tick rhythm, this can take up to a day to achieve but is what makes the car quality and ready to be driven away. Takt time = how many hours worked in a day and how many widgets/features a customer has requested and how efficiently it is delivered. Understanding how to kaizen the tatk time is what makes the business scalable.
A common organisational problem to solve — Bringing the work to life
Most executives know how to put a strategy on a page and present it back to their colleagues, selling the story and the dream of where to take the company and its products next but do they know how to make it all happen?
Individual planning vs planning in large groups
I ask my mentee’s to list their personal 1–3 year goals and then write the pieces of work and steps they needed to take to achieve them. That is pretty straight forward for an individual, but what if I asked my mentee to write their list of goals and then I asked them to hand the goals over to 1000 people to write the next steps and work to be done to achieve them?
You can already see the challenges it would cause:
- Double up’s in work
- Misaligned priorities
- Work blows up into large delayed projects
- Limited capacity of people to deliver what and when
- Merky roles of who is working on what
- How much money to throw at each piece of work
- Overall transparency
- Fragmentation of flow
- Over engineering and over processing
- Forgetting to frequently check in on the relevance of a piece of work and how it’s related to a goal and strategy.
So how do we bring the Hoshin Kanri one pager to life and solve the problems I mentioned above?
One of my favourite writers Johann Hari, author of bestseller ‘Lost Connections’ emphasises the importance of purpose, human connection and meaningful work.
Having purpose and contributing value is key to leading a happy life. If you do not see value or purpose in what you are doing and how it has a positive impact on yourself or others, you can quickly become complacent, start to lack confidence and drive and life feels like more of a chore than a gift.
This is why executives who set unambiguous goals in their organisation are already on the right track.
As stated in my FIRST ARTICLE the Hoshin kanri is a great one pager tool for executives to set these goals. The second part is how the rest of the organisation set the strategies.
Goal 1 example — The ‘WHAT’ and the ‘WHY’
Executive sets the goal — I want to go to Tasmania as quickly and efficiently as possible so that I can spend time with my family.
It’s then up to the team to write the strategies ‘HOW’ do we get there?
Strategy 1. Spirit of Tasmania
Strategy 2. Kayak
Strategy 3. Fly
Involving people in the decision making makes the work more meaningful and empowers the teams to contribute value without being controlled or dictated.
When people can answer the ‘why’ we are working on this it gives meaning and connection to the purpose rather than just stating we are doing this. When the ‘how’ comes into play it gives options to experiment and explore before choosing the pathway.
One goal, 3 strategies, how do we know what one to pick?
The team write BETS, using the Spotify DIBBS (Data, Insights, Belief, Bet) model the teams are required to write data driven bets (example below) Data driven decision making to prove out strategies before starting the work saves the organisation money, time and building the wrong thing for the customers.
In organisations I have gone into help I have seen breathtaking amounts of money wasted on building products that have not been validated by data or insights from the customers or that are aligned to the company goals and strategies.
You wouldn’t go and buy yourself a kayak to paddle to Tasmania when the weather report expected VUCA conditions like stormy weather or shark infested waters.
Prove out the strategy with BETS before putting hands on keyboards or setting sail in your kayak. I have attached an example of how we write bets in our business and with clients.
Once the bets are written and prioritised the organisation needs to establish their delivery engine to deliver the work.
This will be covered in my next article, hope you enjoyed learning more about achieving organisational alignment in this article.
Obeya rooms and war rooms were likened for doing the same job of coming together to strategise and plan the next steps for the company.
Check out my first article on organisational alignment here: HOSHIN KANRI.
If you would like some help creating alignment in your organisation then get in touch, I’d love to chat.
Tam.
