“Vision with action is stronger than hindsight of 20/20.”
The following scenario occurs in every company every year. Business leaders participate in an extensive planning process designed to set goals and establish the strategy for success in the year ahead. All the key groups and business owners provide input, the desired outcomes are agreed upon, timelines and deliverables are approved and communicated, and everyone starts working to make the vision a reality.
Unfortunately, 7 out of 10 companies see their business plans fall short of their objectives due to inefficient execution and unforeseen events. The post-mortem is then filled with 20/20 hindsight as the team wonders what it could have done differently, and how to prevent it the next time. But here’s the kicker: in addition to not executing well, most companies are not applying past lessons learned and they end up mired in a continuous cycle of regret.
Putting the business plan together is the easy part. The tough part is setting good KPIs, frequently charting progress, and identifying and correcting for shortfalls in real time. This is important work that requires consistency and discipline and is an area where more firms need to develop stronger muscles.
With this in mind, let’s cover some of the main reasons why so many manufacturing firms keep falling short on execution, and offer some thoughts on how they can achieve better results through more repeatable processes.
The Preparation Phase is Critical
Companies spend good chunks of time formulating their strategic visions and putting them at the heart of their brand messaging. Vision, however, sits at the very top of the planning pyramid, reflecting the result of what you hope will be a series of successfully executed business plans over multiple years. The tactical detail underneath the vision statement is the map for getting there, but too often companies take wrong turns along the way that make it harder for them to reach their targets.
The Top 3 Barriers to Successful Execution
The impediments to successful execution usually revolve around unclear definition, inconsistent communication, poor resource planning, and most importantly, lack of stakeholder alignment.
Let’s look specifically at three common culprits that can take companies off the rails and lead to a bad case of the shoulda, coulda, woulda’s.
- Not ensuring stakeholder alignment
If you don’t have all the right people on the same page following the same tactical strategy, it can lead to rogue activity and confusion. For example, someone may realize that the company is falling short in a particular area and start working on their own solutions. It is incredibly important to assign stakeholders to lead the key initiatives that will lead to success, and to have frequent check-ins on actions, goals, and progress.
- Inconsistent monitoring of progress and KPIs
Another misstep is not making it a priority to track progress on an ongoing basis through key performance indicators. Companies often start out with regular monitoring and tracking in place, then take their foot off the gas. Frequent monitoring and check-ins and continuous monitoring of KPIs and data patterns allow for the ability to course correct in real time.
- Failing to perform countermeasures
Companies that don’t do countermeasures when things go wrong are wasting a valuable opportunity to improve and instill accountability. One of the most important aspects of any planning process is the ability to be open and admit failure, and to put plans in place to keep it from happening again. Too many companies, however, don’t do this hard problem-solving work and never get to realize how beneficial it can be.
Build a Repeatable Process to Avoid 20/20 Hindsight
As companies look to build repeatable planning frameworks, a challenging task by any measure, here are five strategies and considerations that can provide a solid foundation.
Step 1: Use a Strategy Deployment (Hoshin Kanri) planning approach
The Hoshin Kanri strategy and planning process gives companies a well-defined template for setting three- and five-year breakthrough goals; helps identify the following year’s goals around that same timeframe; builds effective action plans, sets targets for improvement (KPIs); automatically sets up those frequent reviews; and helps companies stay on track and on top of the details.
Step 2: Create action plans aligned with annual initiatives
Next, develop detailed tactics and action plans around the major initiatives that will ultimately drive success, and make sure owners are assigned and regular reviews are incorporated. This may seem obvious, but the devil truly is in the details.
Step 3: Identify your key KPIs and integrate into high-level action plan
Tracking progress is essential and implementing a Daily Management System (DMS) improvement approach helps instill accountability and transparency through continuous communication aimed at understanding successes and failures.
Step 4: Build problem-solving muscles
When you have a miss, use the visual management aspects of the DMS to fully understand where and when, and then use abnormality management to address them quickly. The magic of the DMS is that it essentially creates a discipline for flagging misses quickly and for monitoring KPIs regularly through a basic, three-pronged approach:
- Identifying the root cause – do we truly know why?
- Understanding/assessing course correction options – what can we do now to stay on track?
- Implementing a recovery plan – how are you going to make up what you lost by coming up short? Most firms do not do recovery plans, which is a mistake.
Always Have the Ability to “Flex”
Building maximum operational flexibility into the plan is another key factor in being able to strike the right balance between adapting to change and maintaining discipline. Companies should always adhere to their plans while also being mindful that things can and will happen that can pull the rug out overnight. The power behind building in more flexibility comes from your people, who are critical in carrying out the successful execution of a plan. This runs in a line from executive leadership, which sets the overall tone and mindset, to the leaders on the floor who oversee the daily tasks and hold their teams accountable. Having the ability to constantly flex, along with appropriate tools and training, helps companies zig when things can zag.
Case in Point – “Blindsided” by Change
By ensuring flexibility and leveraging the steps above, your processes and people will be able respond successfully to change and continuously improve along the way. We have seen this time and time again. We worked with a large blind manufacturer recently that had to quickly change strategic course due to a regulatory change and helped them manage through a fairly complex process. However, the process would have been even more complex had the company not baked in the flexibility to adapt and seek help to address the problem as quickly as they could.
The Rewards Merit the Effort
Effective execution of your strategic plan in any business is hard work, and the variables involved in manufacturing make it that much harder and complex. But companies are undermining their own success by treating the annual planning process as a one-time event rather than establishing a daily discipline of managing performance and progress toward strategic goals. The approach of “let’s wait and see how we do and make some minor adjustments next year” is not a strategy for success. In fact, this echoes Einstein’s often-quoted definition of insanity, which is performing the same task the same way over and over again and expecting a different result. Adopting some of these daily management strategies can help take away the 20/20 hindsight and deliver, finally, a different, more appealing result.
