A “real” Black Belt or a Master Black Belt cannot be grown overnight. It takes experience (good and bad) and maturity to develop the depth and breadth of knowledge, skills, and abilities required to affect significant, lasting change across any organization regardless of size or complexity. If individuals in your organization are “shooting the tube”, progressing seamlessly from Green Belt to Black Belt training, consider it a red flag. The purpose of the belt rating is to encourage mentorship and application, not shotgun studies and testing. Allow belts to grow, providing additional training only when current capabilities have been mastered (as proven through continuous application) and as the need within your business becomes apparent. Training and shotgun certifications produce excess and low-quality inventory – pure waste.

And last but certainly not least, consider support from outside of your organization as a necessity. Within three years, a consultant who is worth their salt should be able to develop and deliver training that is tailored to your culture, mentor internal expertise, facilitate improvement efforts to establish an effective standard, and most importantly, provide an unbiased third-party perspective on the state-of-the-union. A good consultant will not hesitate to tell the emperor that he or she is naked.

So…if you can’t answer the “so-what” behind the certifications or belts in your organization – red flag. True transformation is achieved through deliberate evolution.

If your boss is tracking operational measures, you can decipher what is truly important to him/her.

1. Look for logical groupings between different measures (an affinity diagram is especially helpful here). The larger, summary groups could turn out to be strategic focus areas that require improvement in order to achieve leadership’s vision.

2. Work towards formalizing the vision, and then exploring potential objectives across the four perspectives of the scorecard (financial, customers, internal processes, and learning and growth) to ensure a true “balance”.

3. Review the measures currently tracked, and discern leading versus lagging. If they are all lagging, establish the most appropriate leading measures to enable decision making “in process”.

This series of activities can continue until you have a formalized, documented, and enabling strategy. If you decide on a Balanced Scorecard (my personal favorite), great! If you decide on another format, that’s good too. The key is to reach into the quagmire of intent and to shape an approach and a direction that can be clearly communicated and executed. Improvement should follow.

So…cast your votes. My personal favorites are the Interrelationship Digraph and the Nominal Group Technique.

How about you?

Your thoughts?

My advice is this – process “transformation” is not always the best solution. Rather than prescribing a dramatic, rapid change, encourage a gradual performance “evolution”, consistently and constantly focusing on the most troublesome organizational issues (management, policy, equipment, process, etc.). You will need tools to do this, but introduce them in a phased approach.

Start with group dynamics theory, brainstorming, affity diagramming, and NGT. Allow the “students” to run with these tools, making mistakes, and applying them during operational meetings. Progress to the point where the questions start to become “why” instead of “what”. Now the strategic journey has begun. Augment existing capabilities with the 5 Whys, Fishbone Diagrams, Tree Diagrams, and Interrelationship Digraphs. Matrix Diagrams and analysis can follow, with a future advance towards FMEA, control charts, etc.

Master Black Belts are (or should be) intelligent individuals. The people that we support are intelligent too. Take the time to coach your students, and allow them the time to test and question the subject matter in realistic, digestible “chunks”.

In the “for-profit” (and some non-profits) sector, the Learning and Growth perspective supports the Internal Process perspective, which in turn supports the Customer perspective that ultimately supports the Financial perspective.

In other “non-profit” and government sectors, the Resources perspective supports the Learning and Growth perspective, which in turn supports the Internal Process perspective that ultimately supports the Stakeholder perspective.

In any situation, we typically conclude our review of a strategy map at the top. This is a mistake. A mistake that is partly due to the layout of the strategy map itself.

In a purely vertical format, the strategy map reflects a linear and finite approach. The truth is that a strategy map should represent a dynamic, perpetual approach that ensures growth and increased strength. The truth is this – while the “top” perspective on your strategy map should have direct connections to your goals, they should also have supporting connections to your “bottom” two perspectives as well. Let’s consider an extremely generic “for profit” example.

As the improvements in Learning and Growth and complement Internal Process performance optimization, Customers are delighted and revenue increases. This would be the end for a singular fund-raising event. For a business, however, a significant portion of the increased revenue would be subject to reinvestment in Learning and Growth programs and the Internal Processes, which would (hopefully) increase Customer Staisfaction and increase revenue, again. To illustrate this point, I have a circular format for the strategy maps that my clients develop and manage.

While some might claim that this is “just another flavor” or an asthetic modification, I argue that the visual representation is critical for the effective communication of the strategy throughout any organization. Strategic Management is too often treated as the “project of the month/quarter” when in fact it is a living program that transforms and develops with the host organization. A circular, life cycle view of the Strategy Map focuses on continuous performance improvement and communicates a Strategic Management approach that is here to stay.

For templates, contact me via www.strategicorps.com.

The simple answer to project selection pre-data: Strategic Alignment. With a strategic plan implemented and managed, certain strategic initiatives (some with key words such as reduce, improve, increase, etc.) should receive priority attention and treatment. Please note the “should” in the previous sentence. Achieving implementation of a strategic plan is a moderately challenging opportunity. It is the management of said plan that can be a beast. I prefer the Balanced Scorecard methodology, and am familiar and proficient with alternate models. Whatever construct the leaders in your organization select, a minimum requirement should be the means for project selection AND prioritization.

You won’t always have the data to perform a formal analysis. Great! That situation indicates that your first efforts should focus on process identification and definition, including flow units, appropriate metrics, and a means of data capture, analysis, and recommendation generation. BUT – you will need to address a lack of strategic alignment if it exists. You don’t want to focus on the reduction of process variation by using a non-standard, “fire-fighting” approach to project selection. Set the standard by assisting with setting the direction.

Some companies fail in their implementation of the Balanced Scorecard methodology because they focus intensely on their financial measures and lose sight of the others. The “balance” of the scorecard does not stop at the completion of the strategy map. The “balance” must be applied in the creation phase and maintained through the continuous implementation phase, from introduction through each periodic strategic review and revision. This includes metric collection, analysis, and improvement actions for every objective.

What are you experiences with this potential predicament?

Lean, Six Sigma, and other methodologies are not “blue sky” programs. They are here specifically for the “bad” times, yielding results through a cultural transformation combining high degrees of flexibility, quality, and velocity. When any leader arrives at the conclusion that they cannot afford to continue their CPI programs, the question must be asked: “Can you afford not to?”