Catchball Process
Catchball is the back-and-forth of a goal between management levels - thrown down, tested against reality, thrown back up refined - repeated until the target and the people who have to hit it actually agree.
An arrow loops between two levels, the goal passing down and refined numbers passing back up until it lands.
Reach for this when…
- Targets get set at the top and land on the floor as an unwelcome surprise.
- A goal cascade turned into a one-way memo, not a conversation.
- People are hitting the letter of a target while missing what it was meant to achieve.
How to run it
- Set a draft goal at the top, deliberately incomplete.
- Cascade it down to the level that has to deliver it.
- That level tests it against real constraints and throws back its own numbers or concerns.
- Leadership catches the feedback and adjusts the goal, or explains why it stands.
- Repeat the throw until the goal and the plan to hit it are both agreed, not just issued.
A worked example
Situation. Yousef Al-Kaabi's manufacturing group, Falcon Industries in Doha, Qatar, set a plant-wide defect-reduction target from head office - the kind that usually landed on the shop floor as a number nobody believed.
Applied. Instead of issuing it, Yousef threw the draft target to the line supervisors and asked what was actually achievable given the current equipment. They threw back a lower number for year one, with a case for why, plus what they'd need to hit a higher one in year two.
Result. The two-year target that emerged started lower than head office first proposed, but the supervisors owned it. They beat it.
The catch
Catchball takes real time and a leadership team willing to actually change the number, not just perform listening - if the figure that comes back down never moves, people learn fast that catchball is theatre and stop bothering to catch. It also doesn't work as a one-off; it's a habit inside policy deployment, not a single meeting.
If the number that comes back down is identical to the one that went up, nobody caught anything.
Origin: Hoshin Kanri (Japanese policy deployment)