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Master Planning — Bringing It All Together
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Master Planning takes the top-to-bottom, total organizational-involvement of Hoshin Kanri Kanri, marries it with the measures and metrics focus of Balanced Scorecard and adds elements of team-building and organizational development to provide strategic planning efforts that truly transform and improve organizations.
A key element that Hoshin Kanri planning contributes to the Master Planning process is something that the Japanese emphasize—catchball. Catchball is the process of give and take between organizational levels that helps to define strategy in Japanese companies. This overcomes a potential drawback of the balanced scorecard method which seems to be more of a one-way street—the executive team creates the strategy, and it cascades down from there.Catchball—by involving multiple levels of an organization on an ongoing basis— allows Master Planning to be more responsive and flexible than many Balanced Scorecard efforts. With such a strong focus on measures, while overall a good thing employees may be tempted to focus their work only on particular targets (most likely those driving incentive pay).
Kaplan and Norton, recognizing this, emphasize the importance of a balanced set of measurements, which is good. Even so, the risk remains that people will work to achieve their scorecard goals, and may ignore important things that are not on the scorecard. Or, if the scorecard is not refreshed often enough, what looked like an important goal in January may not be very germane in June.
These are the very risks that MPI’s Hoshin Kanri-based Master Planning approach is designed to overcome. By incorporating a team-based, bottom up approach that structurally incorporates frequent catchball sessions, MPI Master Planning gives all organizational participants a birds-eye view of how their particular goals and targets interact with those of other departments. Master Planning draws a clear path from each individual’s “day job” responsibilities to an organization’s overarching goals and targets.
Balanced Scorecard and Hoshin Kanri represent the very best of breakthrough strategic planning. Though closely related, each brings some unique strengths to the formidable task of steering an organization and its employees through the treacherous shoals and reefs of the modern organizational management. MPI Master planning unites and focuses these complimentary strengths to provide an even more powerful tool.
