Hoshin Kanri: sailing safely, even in uncertainty

For the realization of corporate strategies, it is vital to create engagement systems extended to the entire organization so that everyone can make their own contribution. It’s not enough to have a strategic plan, a mission, if we don’t incentivize people to think, dream and achieve big.

Providing a motivating reason why working hard is critical to growing people’s engagement and contributions in the company.

But it is not enough: it is not enough to make a strategic plan, it is not enough to generate the strategies, it is not enough to generate the mission of the company, if it is then not followed every month, every week, by continuous monitoring, which monitors, oversees, reacts, involves, and changes the shot.

Without a monitoring routine it becomes difficult to keep the whole team cohesive and compact.

Measuring and enhancing progress towards long-term goals in the short term is essential to take a small step towards the desired direction.

TheHoshin Kanri, – a word of Japanese origin that encompasses a method of strategic planning of objectives and the methods to pursue them – is the pivotal tool for sharing and executing all the steps that allow grounding and bringing projects to fruition.

Paolo Streparava, CEO Streparava SPA, in a webinar interview with Luciano Attolico, CEO and Founder Lenovys, he shared his experience of using the Hoshin Kanri tool, now in its fourth year of use in the company:

The first thing that comes to mind is great effort: enormous, titanic effort, to put all the strategic aspects in order and acquire a more scientific method for managing and implementing the strategy. […] It was extremely important to be faced with something we had all defined together: it takes away everyone’s alibis. We all looked at the same result, we all shared it, without exception. So first point of attention: involvement means having people on board because they heard it, they partecipated and they wrote it too. The Hoshin Kanri is digital for us, so all the people who have a project, who work on the strategy, who belong to the top positions of the company and those who are involved in the strategy process can access a unique tool, available to everyone, (obviously with the various levels of security and data access). This tool helped us and was fundamental during the Covid period because, thanks to it, in lockdown, we didn’t stop completely: we had our online tool with which to update the projects that, together, we had decided to carry out.

The Hoshin Kanri is the cornerstone tool for a company that grows and develops based on what it has built in the past, but at the same time cultivates a strong future orientation with long-term strategies and new and ambitious goals.