How Does Strategy Remove Waste?

In the fall of 2020, Kaas Tailored hosted a series of Zoom calls unpacking our Daily Management System (DMS). Each month we focused on a different element of our DMS, starting with strategy, then discussing daily huddles, then talking about Visual Management Systems (VMS), and ending with Leader Standard Work. In this post, we’re talking about strategy and how starting with the right strategy will set your team up for success when it comes to adopting a DMS.

How Do You Develop a Strategy?

At Kaas Tailored, when it comes to creating a DMS, the first step in the process is developing your strategy. This means first defining “who we are as a company” and “who we want to become.” Next, it’s important to identify, understand, and choose helpful thinking models so that your team has a shared way of communicating complex ideas that everyone understands. And finally, it’s important to choose the tools you’ll need to get there.

Determine Your Mission

At Kaas Tailored, our mission is to be a platform for human potential to come alive and thrive. Because we know this, we make decisions that align with our mission. You can uncover your mission by answering the questions “who are we as a company” and “who do we want to become?” This gives the team the ability to know if they are rowing in the same direction. Without a mission clearly defined, you may find it easy to get distracted from what is important for the organization.

Choose Your Thinking Models

It’s important to establish thinking models. Thinking models are tools we’ve adopted to help us make sure we can communicate across a diverse group of people to be able to create meaning. Thinking models help speed up the process of understanding and they create a shared way of communicating so that everyone understands. At Kaas, we use thinking models like, “today, tomorrow, day-after-tomorrow,” KRAF, and the Laws to Outcome model. We teach these thinking models to our teams to help us use a shared language so that everyone has a shared way of both communicating and understanding information.

Choose Your Lean Tools

When it comes to continuous improvement, before you decide all the tools you want to use (things like huddles, Kaizen, Agile, and Kata), it’s important to know where you are going as a people. When you know where you are going, you can then choose the right tools to help you get there. These tools will look vastly different between organizations based on their specific contexts and mission.

Choosing a Strategy Helps Remove Waste

When you start with strategy, you’re able to remove waste within your system by communicating to your team where you are trying to go, who you are trying to become, and why you are doing what you’re doing. It allows the whole team to migrate together in the same direction with less waste.

If you’d like to learn more about how to implement aDaily Management System within your organization, or more aboutKaizen andContinuous Improvement, consider signing up for aKaas Tailored Waste Tour.