Jess Orr opened the session with a number that doesn't get cited enough in the goal-setting conversation. Roughly 40 percent of Americans set New Year's resolutions. Of those, only about 8 percent achieve them. Anyone who goes to a gym in January and watches the parking lot empty out by mid-February recognizes the pattern. The willpower-and-motivation theory of behavior change produces a predictable failure rate, year after year, in personal life and in organizations.
Jess had been running New Year's resolutions on herself for seven to nine years before the session and had never broken a 50 percent achievement rate. That isn't catastrophic by the broader statistics. It also isn't good. Half the goals she set for herself, year after year, weren't getting done — and she could feel the pattern was about process rather than effort.
In 2018 she tried something different. She had spent formative years at Toyota using Hoshin Kanri to set and cascade strategic goals across the organization. She had then applied it at another company outside Toyota — with stumbles that taught her almost as much as the successes. The question she asked herself for 2018 was whether the same disciplines that worked for organizational strategy would work for her own personal goals. She set up a personal Hoshin plan and ran it for the year.
The results were in when she gave the webinar at the start of 2019. She had achieved 81 percent of the targets she set for herself. Going from 50 percent to 81 percent on personal goals over a single year of methodology change was, in her words, probably statistically significant without needing to run the test.
The session was Jess's walk-through of what she did, how she would adjust it the next year, and what mattered most about the framework when applied to a single person rather than an organization. The shorter answer: most of Hoshin Kanri transfers directly. The longer answer is what made the hour worth attending.
Jess Orr is a continuous improvement thinker and practitioner with over 10 years of experience across multiple industries, including time at Toyota. She holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Virginia Tech and two Six Sigma Black Belt certifications. (Mark joked during the introduction that the second Black Belt was probably overproduction. Jess responded that she had recently gone back and gotten her Yellow Belt as well, which felt even more wasteful — but she learned something every time.) In her current role she applies her passion for people and processes to empower fellow employees to make impactful and sustainable improvements. Her website and blog are at yokotenlearning.com.
Jess walked carefully through the definition because the Japanese term doesn't translate cleanly into English. Hoshin loosely means direction or compass needle. Kanri means management. Together, the term gets translated variously as "direction and execution," "compass management," "strategy deployment," or "policy deployment." None of the English translations quite captures the full thing.
The working definition Jess offered: Hoshin Kanri is a holistic system for strategic development and execution. The word "system" is doing the work. This isn't strategic planning, which most organizations are familiar with. It's a system for planning and the management and execution of the activities that follow from the planning. The two halves are inseparable.
The way Jess describes it functionally is as a macro PDSA cycle that contains micro PDSA cycles embedded within it. The whole year of Hoshin is a single Plan-Do-Study-Adjust loop. Inside that year, each experimental activity is its own smaller Plan-Do-Study-Adjust loop. The fractal structure is the point. The discipline operates at every scale simultaneously.
What Hoshin Kanri ensures, when it works, is that the daily things you actually work on are aligned with moving toward your true north. The phrase carries weight in Lean traditions. True north is the long-term direction that the organization (or in this case, the individual) is pursuing. The job of Hoshin is to keep the daily work and the true north visibly connected, with measurement points along the way that surface drift before drift becomes failure.
Before getting into the framework, Jess walked through the specific gaps in traditional approaches — both management-by-objectives at organizational level and New Year's resolutions at personal level.
The fundamental problem is misalignment. The daily things you're working on don't necessarily move you toward your strategic vision, or they move you only partially. Even when goals are clearly defined and measurable, the connection between them and what you actually do on Tuesday morning is unclear. Jess used a personal example most people will recognize. "I want to lose 20 pounds this year" is a goal. It says nothing about how. There are thousands of ways to attempt that goal, and which way you choose largely determines whether you'll succeed.
Vision is the next gap. New Year's resolutions tend to be one-year goals disconnected from any longer-term direction. The question of "where do I want to be in ten years" doesn't typically enter the conversation, which means the goals being set may or may not be the right goals to be working on at all.
The most consequential gap, in Jess's framing, is the absence of a system to measure progress incrementally. The standard New Year's resolution gets set on January 1 and re-evaluated on December 31. The intervening 364 days produce no structural mechanism to detect that you're falling behind. By the time you discover the goal isn't being met, the year is gone. Hoshin builds the check-in mechanism into the framework. You see drift early enough to respond.
The scattershot problem applies to organizations and individuals practicing continuous improvement. Jess shared an example she'd watched in an organization. Someone decided to run a kaizen event to reduce changeover time on a machine, with the theoretical impact of increased throughput across the facility. The project succeeded. The facility had been operating under capacity to begin with. The result of the improvement was that workers had to be sent home on Fridays because there wasn't enough demand to absorb the new throughput. The improvement had been disconnected from a real goal, and the unintended consequence was the kind that shows up only when you trace the work back to what actually mattered. Hoshin's alignment discipline would have caught that mismatch before the kaizen event started.
Jess summarized what makes Hoshin distinctive across five characteristics.
It begins with long-term strategic vision. True north comes first. Everything else is in service of moving toward it. Toyota's vision statement that Jess quoted: "Toyota will lead the way to the future of mobility, enriching lives around the world with the safest and most responsible ways of moving people." The vision sets the direction for every subsequent decision.
It focuses on the critical few rather than the trivial many. Jess was emphatic about this. Many organizations have a number of strategic goals, but too many of them — which means each one gets executed with mediocrity instead of excellence. Effort gets dispersed. Resources get spread thin. Nothing gets the focused attention required to actually move it. The discipline is to pick few enough goals that real progress on each is possible.
It maximizes effort and resources. Everyone is rowing in the same direction. Nobody's effort is being wasted on work that doesn't connect to the vision.
It includes a catch ball process. This is the element that distinguishes Hoshin most sharply from management-by-objectives. Catch ball is the practice of soliciting feedback on the Hoshin plan from people across the organization (or in personal application, from trusted advisors) before executing the plan. The plan improves through the iteration. Buy-in develops because people have shaped the plan rather than being handed it. We'll return to catch ball later.
It defines the process, not just the result. Hoshin doesn't just commit to outcomes — it specifies the experimental activities you'll engage in to produce those outcomes, with measurement of whether the activities are actually working. Embedded in this is the recognition that the activities you pick at the start of the year may turn out to be wrong, and Hoshin builds in checkpoints to evaluate that assumption rather than treating the initial plan as a contract that can't be modified.
Jess broke the Hoshin process into six steps. The first four are the planning phase. The fifth is the doing phase. The sixth is the studying and adjusting phase. Importantly, the planning steps consume a substantial portion of the total time. Jess described spending the equivalent of several days reflecting, drafting, returning to, and modifying her personal Hoshin plan each year. The depth of thought during planning is what makes the rest of the year operational.
Define your long-term destination. Roughly ten years out, though some mature organizations look much further. (Toyota has a 60-year vision, which Jess noted is probably necessarily vague given how many environmental conditions can change over that horizon.)
The vision does three jobs. It defines true north. It drives the intermediate and short-term targets that come later. And — this is the part most goal-setting frameworks miss — it should be large enough to create obstacles. Hoshin isn't asking for incremental change. It's asking for breakthrough change. The vision should create problems between where you are today and where you want to be, because those problems are what the year of work is actually solving.
An example Jess offered for personal application: "achieve optimal physical health and be financially prepared for retirement so I can fully enjoy life and time with family." Jess's own vision: "make a broad and lasting impact to the greater community by spreading the principles and practice of continuous improvement and empowering others to do the same." Both vision statements give direction, inspire, and provide motivation when the daily work gets hard.
Compare your current state to your vision. Identify the primary gaps. Not all the gaps — the largest ones. The ones where the distance between where you are and where you want to be is greatest.
This step often gets skipped because people are eager to jump from vision to goals. Skipping it produces goals that aren't actually focused on the work that would move you most. Jess used her personal example from 2018. Her vision was about spreading continuous improvement principles. Her current state was that she had been a Black Belt for about two years and the work had started to feel like rinse-and-repeat — she wasn't learning new tools fast enough, wasn't growing her skills. Her second gap: she had a limited reputation and platform in the broader CI community. To spread principles, you need a platform and a reputation. She had neither. Those two gaps drove the rest of her planning.
What external opportunities are available right now that would help close those gaps? You can do a full SWOT analysis here (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), but Jess focused primarily on opportunities since she already had a good grasp of her own strengths and weaknesses.
The point is to look for external factors that might accelerate your progress. For the personal-health example, opportunities might include a spouse who's also motivated to improve their physical health and a recent empty nest that creates room to downsize. For Jess in 2018: an open Master Black Belt promotion at her company, the chance to partner with established CI resources like KaiNexus and Gemba Academy to develop and deliver content, and a successful turnaround project she had completed that would make a compelling story for building her reputation.
These are the intermediate destinations between current state and the ten-year vision. Jess was emphatic about a constraint: no more than two to three objectives. The constraint exists because the scope of three-to-five-year work is broad enough that more than three objectives produces dispersion.
Quantify where possible. Some objectives — like the example of running the Boston Marathon with a spouse in under three hours — are easily quantified. Others, like Jess's own objectives around building competency and reputation in the CI community, are less easily quantified but can still be evaluated for progress. The principle is to be as specific as the objective allows, and to accept that some personal objectives have softer edges than organizational ones.
The annual goals are where most New Year's resolutions start. By the time you arrive here in the Hoshin process, you've done substantial work — vision, scan, opportunities, objectives — that informs which annual goals actually matter. Again, two to three annual goals is the recommended cap. Jess identified this constraint as one of the biggest changes from her previous years of resolutions, where she had typically run eight to ten goals at once. The scope was too broad, and the goals competed with each other rather than reinforcing each other.
A useful test: do the annual goals you've chosen connect to more than one objective? If yes, you're maximizing the effort. The personal-fitness example had this property — training for a sprint triathlon advanced both the vital-health objective and the Boston Marathon objective simultaneously. Goals that serve multiple objectives are operationally more efficient than goals that serve only one.
Once goals are set, Jess shifted into brainstorming mode. Not "what should I do" but "what are all the things I could do?" Generate a broad span of possible activities for each goal. Resist the temptation to pick activities yet. The brainstorm is purely about widening the option space.
Solicit input from others during the brainstorm. Tell trusted advisors what you're trying to achieve and ask what ideas they have. The catch ball process can begin here as well as later — fresh perspectives during ideation often produce options the goal-setter wouldn't have generated alone.
After brainstorming, evaluate ideas on two dimensions: benefit (how much will this activity advance the goal?) and effort (how much resource will it consume?). Jess showed two tools — a numerical scoring system and a benefit/effort matrix. She prefers the matrix because the visual orientation makes the upper-right quadrant (high benefit, low effort) easy to identify at a glance.
The ranking is a guide, not a verdict. Something in the red zone (low benefit, high effort) isn't automatically disqualified. Use the ranking to inform a yes/no/maybe decision on each activity. The "maybe" pile becomes a reserve — if the yes activities aren't producing results during the year, you can pull from the maybes for replacements.
Select fewer activities rather than more. The discipline of doing fewer activities well beats the temptation to do more activities poorly.
For each selected activity, develop a timeline. Consider known constraints in your schedule. Jess shared an example: she knew she would be speaking at the AME 2018 conference in October, so the entire month was effectively blocked out. She scheduled other activities around that constraint rather than fighting it.
Set incremental progress targets. Monthly is a reasonable cadence; some activities warrant different intervals. Choose how you'll track progress — Jess developed her own daily management system posted on her office wall, others use bullet journals, others use software.
The element Jess spent the most time on was triggers. A trigger is the threshold at which missing a target produces an action. Without triggers, every miss looks like a crisis, and you respond to noise as if it were a signal. With triggers, you can distinguish between routine variation and a real problem worth addressing.
Jess's typical trigger is two consecutive months of missing target. One month of missing target isn't enough — variation happens. Two months in a row signals that something has changed and warrants a response. Other practitioners use percentage-based triggers (a month at less than 80 percent of target). The specific threshold matters less than having a threshold at all. Mark added during the discussion that this concept ties directly to his book "Measures of Success" — knowing when to react and when not to react is one of the most consequential disciplines in performance measurement, and most organizations and individuals overreact to normal variation by treating every dip as a problem.
Hoshin gets documented on a single sheet of paper. Jess deliberately held off on showing templates until after the thinking was clear, because the templates can become a distraction from the underlying thought process.
Two main template structures exist. The X matrix is the traditional Hoshin template, showing cascading alignment from vision down to tactical activities in a visually distinctive way. Jess tried the X matrix and found it overkill for her purposes — and frankly, hard to understand for anyone who hasn't worked with it extensively. She moved to the strategic A3 format, which she finds more accessible and easier to use, and which tells the story of the Hoshin more naturally. The alignment from vision to activities isn't as visually explicit on a strategic A3, but it can be verified by walking through the document.
Before executing, review the plan with trusted advisors. Family, friends, coworkers. Ask: am I focusing on the right things? Do you see any concerns? What might I be missing? What additional ideas do you have?
The catch ball process improves the plan and surfaces gaps that the planner can't see alone. Jess shared an example from her own 2018 planning. She had been considering pursuing an external Master Black Belt certification. Several of her advisors asked whether that was really moving her toward her vision. After thinking about it, she decided the internal certification was sufficient and dropped the external pursuit. The catch ball saved her several months of effort on something that wouldn't have advanced her actual goals.
For organizations, catch ball is even more critical because the Hoshin plan affects many people. Getting alignment and buy-in through dialogue rather than top-down dictation produces dramatically different execution quality.
Once the plan exists, the work is to execute it and check monthly progress.
When a trigger is reached, the response is to attempt to identify the true root cause for the gap. Jess used her own example. One of her goals was to read 12 continuous improvement books during the year. Her trigger was two consecutive months of missing the monthly target. When the trigger fired, she ran 5 Whys analysis and found that the root cause was travel — she was traveling frequently during two months and didn't like packing books because they were heavy. The countermeasure was buying a Kindle and loading books onto it. The countermeasure worked and brought her back on track.
The discipline of identifying root causes rather than reacting at the surface level matters because surface-level responses produce temporary results. The root cause analysis on the book-reading example produced a structural change that prevented the same problem from recurring. Without root cause analysis, the response might have been "try harder to read more" — which would have failed for the same reason next time.
On a quarterly basis, the Hoshin plan gets a deeper review. Are you still aligned with your vision? Do you need to adjust, eliminate, or add any goals or activities? Have environmental conditions changed in ways that require modification?
Jess shared a significant pivot from her own 2018. One of her goals had been to obtain a promotion to Master Black Belt. Mid-year, her younger sister had the opportunity to come live with Jess and start college, and Jess wanted to be present to support that. The Master Black Belt role would have been too demanding for the kind of presence she wanted to provide. She also identified that an open practitioner role at her company offered a still-meaningful promotion that would be less demanding than Master Black Belt. She updated her goal to pursue the practitioner role instead. In her end-of-year reflection, she was glad she had made the pivot.
The principle she emphasized: Hoshin is dynamic, not static. It isn't set at the start of the year and reviewed only at the end. The quarterly reviews are deliberate — deep enough to justify any changes that get made, structured enough to avoid changing direction just because something shiny appeared. Adapting when conditions warrant it isn't failure. It's the discipline working as designed.
At the end of the year, reflect deeply. Did you meet all your annual goals? If not, why not? What countermeasures do you need to put in place for next year? What went well that you want to continue? What challenges did you have, and how can you improve the Hoshin process itself?
For 2018, Jess hit 81 percent of her targets. She had established her platform, Yokoten Learning, but hadn't yet figured out what to specialize in. That insight became input to her 2019 Hoshin — narrowing the focus of the platform rather than trying to do everything.
This is the macro PDSA cycle closing. The plan was the plan. The doing was the year. The studying is the reflection. The adjusting is the next year's Hoshin, informed by what the previous year taught.
Jess closed with a set of practical recommendations for anyone trying this for the first time.
Take an experimental approach. You're not going to get it perfect the first year. Commit to the process and see what the results are. Adjust the next year based on what you learned.
Go slow to go fast. Start small. Even one or two annual goals is enough for the first year. Don't bite off more than you can chew. Jess identified this as a personal failure mode — she had taken on too many goals in 2018 and was narrowing for 2019.
Embed the micro PDSA cycles in your activities. The activities you select are experiments. Are they actually moving you toward the goals? If not, adjust them.
Be disciplined about tracking, reviewing, and responding. This is the daily and weekly habit that the macro framework depends on. The plan doesn't work if you don't actually look at it.
Adapt as needed. Quarterly reviews aren't optional. Conditions change. Your understanding of what's required changes. Adaptation is part of the framework, not a deviation from it.
Aim for progress, not perfection. Toyota isn't perfect at Hoshin. Jess isn't perfect at Hoshin. Nobody is. The point is the improvement, year over year, in both the results and the practice.
The framework Jess described is operational discipline. The work of choosing the vision is the work. The work of identifying the critical few objectives is the work. The work of running catch ball with trusted advisors is the work. The monthly check-ins, the trigger-based responses, the root cause analyses, the quarterly reviews, the year-end reflection — all of this is human discipline that no software substitutes for.
What infrastructure does in this context is reduce the structural friction that makes the discipline harder than it needs to be. For an individual, a wall in a home office can hold the Hoshin plan visibly enough that monthly check-ins happen because the plan is in front of you. For an organization, the equivalent visibility across departments, facilities, and levels requires structure beyond what physical artifacts can provide. The cascading alignment that Hoshin promises — vision to objectives to annual goals to daily activities — depends on the cascade being visible at every level. Without that visibility, the cascade exists on paper but doesn't operate in practice.
The trigger-based response discipline Jess described maps directly to how performance data should be tracked. Triggers exist because most variation is normal and only some variation is meaningful. Mark referenced his book "Measures of Success" during the discussion, and the underlying principle — using process behavior charts to distinguish signal from noise — applies whether the metric is personal reading pace or organizational throughput. Infrastructure that supports this kind of measurement makes the trigger discipline operational rather than theoretical. Without it, every monthly miss looks identical and the response becomes either chronic overreaction or chronic underreaction.
The catch ball process scales the same way. One person playing catch ball with three or four trusted advisors can run the process informally. Twenty teams across an organization playing catch ball on their respective Hoshin plans cannot. The structure that supports cross-team visibility, comment, and refinement is what makes catch ball operational at scale rather than ceremonial.
None of this changes what Jess was teaching. The vision is the vision. The discipline is the discipline. The willingness to plan deeply before executing, to track honestly during the year, and to reflect rigorously at the end is what produces the result. What infrastructure does is keep the framework visible and trackable across the scale at which most organizations operate, and across the year-over-year horizon at which personal Hoshin actually has to live to produce compounding results.
What is Hoshin Kanri? A Japanese term that translates loosely to "direction and execution." It's a holistic system for strategic development and execution — not just planning, but the management and execution of activities that follow. It's also known as compass management, strategy deployment, and policy deployment. Functionally, Jess describes it as a macro PDSA cycle that contains micro PDSA cycles within it. The discipline ensures that daily work stays aligned with long-term vision through built-in checkpoints, measurement, and adaptation.
How is Hoshin different from New Year's resolutions or management by objectives? Several ways. Hoshin begins with a long-term vision (typically ten years) rather than starting at the annual goal level. It cascades from vision to three-to-five-year objectives to annual goals to specific activities — so the daily work is structurally connected to the long-term direction. It focuses on the critical few rather than the trivial many, deliberately capping the number of objectives and goals. It includes a catch ball process for getting feedback before executing. It defines the process (not just the result), specifying experimental activities and measurement. It builds in checkpoints to detect and respond to drift before year-end. And it explicitly treats the plan as adaptive — quarterly reviews are part of the discipline, not deviations from it.
Why did Jess move from 50 percent to 81 percent goal achievement? Several reasons that compound. She narrowed from eight to ten goals to two to three. She started from a ten-year vision rather than jumping straight to annual goals, which ensured the goals she chose actually mattered. She specified activities, not just outcomes, so she had a concrete plan rather than vague intentions. She built monthly check-ins with trigger-based responses, so drift got caught and addressed during the year. She ran catch ball with trusted advisors before committing. And she allowed adaptation when conditions warranted it, which let her pivot from Master Black Belt to a different promotion path mid-year rather than abandoning the goal entirely.
What's a trigger and why does it matter? A trigger is a threshold at which a missed target produces an action. Without triggers, every miss looks identical and the response becomes either chronic overreaction (treating normal variation as a crisis) or chronic underreaction (ignoring real signals as if they were noise). Jess's typical trigger is two consecutive months of missing target. The specific threshold matters less than having a threshold at all. The discipline distinguishes signal from noise.
Why two to three objectives and goals rather than more? Because focus produces excellence and dispersion produces mediocrity. Jess shared an example from outside Toyota where her organization tried to run seven strategic goals in a single year. The goals weren't unreasonable individually, but the combined effort spread the organization so thin that none of them got the attention required to actually move. The same dynamic applies at personal level — eight to ten goals dispersed attention enough that she couldn't sustain focus on any of them. Two to three is enough to make real progress on each.
What is catch ball? The practice of reviewing your Hoshin plan with trusted advisors and modifying it based on their feedback. For organizations, this means cross-level dialogue between senior leadership and the next level down before the plan is finalized. For personal application, it means asking family, friends, or coworkers questions like: am I focusing on the right things? Do you see any concerns? What might I be missing? What additional ideas do you have? The catch ball process improves plan quality, surfaces gaps the planner can't see alone, and builds buy-in through dialogue rather than dictation.
Should you use the X matrix or a strategic A3? Jess tried both. The X matrix is the traditional Hoshin template and clearly shows cascading alignment from vision to activities — but it can be complicated and intimidating, particularly for first-time practitioners. The strategic A3 is more accessible and tells the story of the Hoshin more naturally. The cascading alignment is less visually explicit on a strategic A3, but it can be verified by walking through the document. Jess recommends starting with the strategic A3 and graduating to the X matrix only after substantial Hoshin experience. For most practitioners, the strategic A3 is sufficient indefinitely.
Can Hoshin be applied to short-term goals, like six months or one year? The framework applies, but Jess would push back on why the goal is only short-term. The first few steps (vision, scan, opportunities, three-to-five-year objectives) provide the strategic context that makes annual goals meaningful. If you skip those steps and start with a one-year goal, you risk choosing the wrong goal — one that's plausible but doesn't actually advance you toward what matters most. The full Hoshin process is worth running even if you only execute one annual cycle initially.
How do you analyze the 20 percent of goals that get missed? For Jess in 2018, the root cause was twofold. First, she couldn't directly measure whether some activities were moving her toward her vision — particularly her continuous improvement reading. Second, she had too many activities, which dispersed her focus. Her countermeasure for 2019 was to narrow the focus and to find better measurement for the activities that remained. The discipline of analyzing why goals were missed — rather than just regretting that they were — is what makes the year-over-year improvement cycle work.
How does Hoshin Kanri relate to Toyota Kata? They're complementary. Both are forms of PDSA at different levels of granularity. Hoshin operates at the annual macro level. Kata operates at the daily and weekly micro level. Jess noted that Toyota Kata would help her further promote humble inquiry and experimentation, particularly because her own thinking tends to be linear and Kata helps explore alternative options. Integrating Kata into a Hoshin framework strengthens the experimental discipline at the activity level.
What about people who set big goals and get scared off by the size of the change? Mark raised this during the discussion and referenced Bob Maurer's "The Spirit of Kaizen." Maurer's argument is that when change feels too big, the amygdala triggers fight-or-flight responses that shut down the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain you need to actually pursue the change. The countermeasure is to make change small enough that fear doesn't activate. If "read 12 books a year" produces resistance, the smaller intervention might be "read five minutes before bed." Once the five-minute habit is established, it expands naturally. The principle applies inside the Hoshin framework — break activities into small enough steps that you can actually start them.
How do you handle uncertainty about which activities will work? Take your best educated guess, place it on the benefit/effort matrix, and then experiment to verify. The matrix is a hypothesis, not a verdict. As Mark and Jess discussed, learning to be comfortable with not knowing is part of the practice. Some activities you thought would be low-effort will turn out to be high-effort. Some you expected to produce high benefit will turn out to be neutral. The discipline is to track honestly and adjust based on what the experiments reveal. Certainty isn't available. Progress through experimentation is.
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