Hi guys, some weeks ago I spoke about the importance of having a vision for a company, that post can be found here. In this post I will explain a possible way how companies can educate their employees to work towards their “Company Vision”. This blog post is inspired by the book “Toyota Kata” written by Rother. All pictures are taken from the book.
If your company is a small start up, I believe it´s easier to understand what they need to do in order to work towards a company´s vision. But how can you do the same if your company has thousands of stakeholders? This is what we will discuss in this post.
A Vision is something blurry, vague and very distant. The path is unclear and cannot be know in advance. So how do we find and stay on the path? The answer is to create “Target Conditions”.
Across an organisation, people should work towards a vision using successive target conditions. A target condition typically represents a step closer to the vision and a challenge that is not achievable with a current setup within a company. As Rother wrote in his book: “You can think of a target condition like a much shorter-term desired state that is more clearly defined than the distant vision. ” Likewise the vision, a target condition is not a financial or an accounting target, instead is a description of a condition. When a target condition is reached, another one is created.
When a target condition is defined, it is not optional nor easily changeable. A tutor gives all freedom to a responsible person who figures out “how” to achieve the condition, this is where Toyota is really good: People Empowerment. Humans are good at solving problems and arranging new ways to achieve new levels of performance and that´s why Toyota gives a power to people to come up with their own solutions. The picture below summarises what was discussed in this post. This blog post is a brief introduction, during the next weeks I will continue explaining “target conditions” more into detail .
What do you think about it? Do you think the concept can be useful for your company/organization? These and other topics will be discussed in our MeetUp “Creating High Performing Organizations in Munich” if you want to join us do it here.
