Policy Deployment
Policy Deployment (Hoshin Kanri) turns a handful of breakthrough goals into the specific daily actions and numbers that every team owns, through a two-way negotiation up and down the organisation, run as a repeating annual cycle rather than a one-off cascade.
The plan loops round a circle, goals and actions moving down through the organisation and back up again each year.
Reach for this when…
- Your strategy sits in a slide deck and nobody below the top team can tell you what it means for their week.
- Every department has its own priorities and none of them add up to the same goal.
- You set annual targets but never check whether the daily work is actually moving them.
How to run it
- Agree three to five breakthrough objectives for the next one to three years.
- Translate each into annual objectives owned by named managers.
- Cascade targets and methods down through catchball: teams push back before they commit.
- Map objectives, targets and owners on an X-Matrix so everyone sees the links.
- Review monthly with a bowling chart: plan versus actual, and act on the gaps, then feed the results into the next cycle.
A worked example
Situation. Aya Kouassi ran a garment export business outside Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, with a three-year growth target that lived only in her head and a spreadsheet nobody else opened.
Applied. She picked three breakthrough objectives, then ran catchball with her line managers, letting them push back on targets before she signed off the X-Matrix.
Result. Production and sales targets finally lined up, and the monthly bowling chart caught a slipping export lane before it cost her a season.
The catch
Policy Deployment needs real catchball, not goals handed down and stamped agreed. Skip the negotiation and it becomes command and control with extra paperwork. It also assumes stable enough conditions to hold a target for a year, which does not suit a business changing shape every quarter.
If the targets only ever move in one direction, top to bottom, you are not doing catchball.
Origin: Bridgestone Tire Company (Japan, 1960s); refined by Toyota and Komatsu, drawing on Deming and Juran