The Role of Catchball in Lean and Strategic Planning

Catchball is one of the simplest and most effective ways to achieve continuous improvement in your organization. To reduce ambiguity and misinterpretation during the planning phase of Hoshin Kanri management uses a fact-based inter-level negotiation process known as “Catchball”. The word “catchball” denotes a simple social game in Japan in which a circle of young children throw a baseball back and forth. It metaphorically describes a participative process that uses iterative planning sessions to field questions, clarify priorities, build consensus, and ensure that strategies, objectives, and measures are well understood, realistic and sufficient to achieve the objectives.

Hoshin planning begins with the senior management identifying the strategic outcomes/goals to be achieved, complete with deadlines. Once determined, the ‘challenges’ are sent to the operational units who break them down and determine what each unit and person has to do to be able to achieve the management objective. They then bounce the ‘ball’ back to senior management who catches it and determines if the execution committed to will be satisfactory or not. If it is not, the ‘ball’ is bounced back to the operations folks again who catch it and respond accordingly.

The conversation about strategic objectives and means widens as top management deploys its strategy to middle management because managers throw ideas back and forth from one level of the organization to another. There are three major benefits to catchball. First, it opens up new channels of communication between company leaders and process owners, which greatly improves the quality of the organization’s shared knowledge about its processes, people and relationships. Second, it forges new relationships necessary to execute the strategy. Third, by engaging middle and even front line managers in genuine give-and-take negotiations—that is, by getting their buy-in—Hoshin dramatically reduces the cost of getting people to do what they’ve agreed to do.

In short, catchball is a disciplined multi-level planning methodology for “tossing an idea around.” It takes strategic issues to the grassroots level, asking employees at each level of management to “value add” to the plan based on data analysis and experience of their functional areas.

Most processes are built around the existing organizational structure depicted in the top of the picture. Targets and measures are set and many times a mandate on how we will achieve them. Hoshin Kanri through the use of catchball develops a more collaborative structure and as a result an easier method for change and even more importantly sustainability.

It all sounds great but it requires a huge amount of work and patience achieving consensus and playing catchball, but it is worth it.  You must fight the urge to just delegate the tasks to your team when you get impatient and the pressures are mounting.  You must “give up control” and fight the Amercian mentality of “I’m the boss and I’m the smartest person!”  You’ll also encounter team members that don’t want the accountability of developing solutions!  Don’t be discouraged by these things as you play ball.