Achieving strategic objectives is the most important, and often the most difficult, responsibility of any organization. It is all too easy to lose sight of long-term goals when faced with day to day tasks and inevitable emergencies. Certain circumstances make this challenge even greater. Strategy deployment software can help any organization stay aligned and track progress, but if you fall into one or more of these categories, you have even more to gain.

Hoshin Kanri, translated as “strategy deployment” or “management compass,” is a Lean methodology for aligning strategy, measures, and improvement efforts across an entire organization. This means that every person from the front-line staff to senior executives understands the organization’s primary goals and strives to reach those goals through continuous improvement activities, both large and small. Hoshin Kanri steers an organization toward long-term strategic objectives and intermediate goals while maintaining and improving key business processes and results through systematic planning and good organizational alignment.

If you look around any public space today, odds are you will see more than one person with their head in a phone. They have become an integral part of our lives. 

This is one example of how technology has enabled changes in our behaviors that we now take for granted. We can stay in constant communication with our teams. We have a world of information at our fingertips. We can capture Pokémon while in line at the DMV. For better or worse, technology shapes our lives in many ways.

We should also consider the impact it has on organizational culture. If we are not careful, technologies can shape our cultures in unintended ways. Instead, we should make an effort to use technologies that support our desired approach.

This is especially true when trying to develop a culture of continuous improvement. Any software or technology that you use should support your chosen improvement methodology. Here are four key ways in which improvement software can help shape your culture.

Companies decide to invest in and implement Kaizen software for a number of compelling reasons. It has been shown to increase employee engagement in continuous improvement. It makes it possible to calculate the impact of improvement efforts and it creates a repository of tribal knowledge. What’s not to love? But not all organizations experience the same level of success when they roll out Kaizen software. Here are a few best practices to help you get the most out of yours.

We’ve written before about how the Lean technique of Catchball is a valuable improvement tool. The process of passing ideas back and forth as well as up and down is an effective way to keep people engaged in positive change. It also has an important role to play in strategic planning and strategy deployment.

Organizations that adopt the Lean approach to business management have many improvement tools at their disposal. Lean software supports them all in various ways and creates a unified platform for all types of improvement work.

It’s September so, of course lots of folks have football on the brain. Yours truly included. That’s probably why I thought it might be interesting to think about how huddles in football relate to the daily huddles and huddle boards that many organizations use to manage their improvement efforts. I decided to Google the word huddle and found the following passage in the Wikipedia entry for “huddle.”

“In sport, a huddle is an action of a team gathering together, usually in a tight circle, to strategize, motivate or celebrate. It is a popular strategy for keeping opponents insulated from sensitive information, and acts as a form of insulation when the level of noise in the venue is such that normal on-field communication is difficult. Commonly the leader of the huddle is the team captain and it is the captain who will try to inspire his fellow team members to achieve success. Similarly, after an event a huddle may take place to congratulate one another for the team’s success, or to commiserate a defeat.”

In my last post, we learned that while our brain has the capacity to honor the experiences of others and incorporate that data into its decision making, the fact is that the more power and controlone has, the less likely we are to do so. The Hogleven study that came to this conclusion found that “People in positions of power tend to act in a self-interested manner and display reduced interpersonal sensitivity to their powerless counterparts.”

This matters to leaders because, in order for your employees to perceive you as credible, they must see you as a worthwhile partner who is also concerned with what matters to them. If credibility is the foundation for any improvement effort to get off the ground, then Hogleven has unearthed a pivotal dilemma: the success of your well-intended change initiatives rests upon the decisions of the people who need to implement those changes. And the choice they are making is whether they believe in you or not.

If our recent conversations with executive teams and managers are any indication, Kaizen events are getting something of a bad rap. It seems that there are some mistaken beliefs floating around that are causing organizations to miss out on the potential benefits of the rapid improvement approach.

We’d like to take a minute to set the record straight.

I’m really excited that we’re holding our 2nd KaiNexus User Conference in Austin in November. Like last year, the main days (the 3rd and the 4th) will be jam packed full of great talks, panel discussions, and customer stories. I’ll be giving a talk again and we’ll also be joined by Jamie Flinchbaugh, who will give another keynote talk.