Breakthrough Objectives

Overview
Breakthrough objectives are the vital few
significant changes needed for the organization to
achieve its vision.

There's a three-way test all breakthrough

objectives must satisfy.

First, a breakthrough objective must be a Stretch

target that requires cross-functional cooperation
to achieve. This is important since the Hoshin
process is about radical change made possible
through collaboration and teamwork.

Next, the objective should be SMART - which we first learned about in the Practical Problem
Solving course. As a review SMART objectives are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic,
and time-bound.

And finally, breakthrough objectives must build significant organizational capability by turning
the Vision we learned about in the last module into reality. In other words, a breakthrough
objective must help us move closer to our ideal Vision of where we want the company to be.

Now, there are many ways to go about defining breakthrough objectives. The most obvious is
when a specific organizational challenge or opportunity comes to the forefront.

For example, a company may have a serious quality control issue potentially leading to the loss
of customers. In this case, a breakthrough objective may be focused on a specific quality
initiative.

Additionally, there are several tools that can be used to help an organization identify high
impact breakthrough objectives.

Radar Chart
The first tool, which we learned about in the 7 QC Tools course, is the radar chart. We use
the radar chart to perform a gap analysis of where the team believes the vision elements
identified in the previous step currently are.

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To do this we place the vision elements on the outer rim as shown below. We then have all
team members vote, using colored stickers or different colored markers, on where they
believe each vision element is at by placing their sticker or dot on the spoke of each element
as shown here.

It should be noted, for example purposes, only 3 associates have voted here. When possible
real data should be used to accurately quantify things… but, in many cases, we'll rely on the
expertise and opinions of our team members. Once all the votes are consolidated and a single
score for each element is calculated by averaging the results a new radar chart is completed as
shown here. In Treetops situation we see that there's a large gap with the "Operational
Excellence" Vision Element.

In other words, the team feels like improvement is needed in this area. Conversely, the team
feels the organization is doing very well with the vision element of "Our associates are totally
satisfied with their jobs" as shown in the radar chart.

Once the radar chart is complete the team can easily see what vision elements need the most
focus enabling them to be able to narrow in on a potential breakthrough objective.

Relations Diagram
Next, in addition to the radar chart another powerful tool that can be used to identify
opportunities for improvement is called the Relations Diagram sometimes referred to as the
Interrelationship Digraph.

To create a Relations Diagram the Treetop team listed the vision elements as shown below.
The team then seeks to understand which elements influence others.

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To do this they simply asked whether each element causes or enables another element. For
example, the team asked whether Employee Training & Development causes or enables
Operational Excellence to which the team all agreed it did.

As a result the team simply drew an arrow from box 2 to box 7 as shown above. Once the
team worked around each element individually their final result looked like this.

To help quantify the results the team simply counted the number of arrows in and out of each
box. The vision elements with a lot of incoming arrows may serve as desired outcomes of the
vision while the elements with the most arrows out represent the primary causes or drivers
of the vision.

For example, we see that element 5 - Operational Excellence - had 2 arrows in and 3 arrows
out while element 7 - Strong Financial Performance - had 5 arrows in and only 1 arrow out.

Now, at this point the Treetop team used the results from the radar chart and relations
diagram to hone in on a vision element to focus on for their initial breakthrough objective.

After some excellent discussion the team decided to initially focus on the 5th Vision Element -
Operational Excellence - since there was a large gap in the radar chart while also having 3
arrows out in the relations diagram.

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Obviously this element is still far too vague to be a breakthrough objective so the team
completed another Affinity Diagram brainstorming session in order to indentify some
breakthrough objectives focused on Operational Excellence.

After an hour of work the team narrowed their focus to Increasing the Productivity of their
Assembly department by 45% within the next 12 months. The metric the team chose to use
to gauge success was net profit per assembler which accounted for things such as overtime
worked.

At this point the Treetop team could have chosen another breakthrough objective, or possibly
even two more, but instead they decided to focus all of their efforts on one since this was
their first attempt at Hoshin Planning.

With this said, we've seen companies successfully attack as many as 3 to 4 breakthrough
objectives but these organizations were extremely skilled at Hoshin Planning… so for those
just starting out we'd encourage you to initially focus on 1 or 2 breakthrough objectives.

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