During the last few workshops I have run with farmers, there has been huge interest in our farm’s one page strategy document.
Lean is not only about the tools we often talk about, but also has a huge strategic component. In a lean company a big process is strategic planning and cascading goals throughout the organisation – this is known as Hoshin Kanri in Japanese (goal policy deployment process in translation).
While on our farm we keep the process much more simple and not as robust as what I did in Toyota and with some of my larger corporate clients, it is still a vital process for any farm business. A good starting point is to set a strategy for your farm for the medium/ long term. We have done this over many brainstorming sessions since 2017 with our team and put it into a one page format. This is our basis for all our goal setting and focus/ prioritisation. Each year (as we did recently in June – see video on video page) we have an annual strategy day with our entire team. This year we did it off site which was fantastic. I will do a seperate post detailing this day. One of the things we do during this day is to review our strategy document and set new targets for each of our priorities with the team. This keeps us focused on what’s important and ensures we have a clear common purpose for the season ahead. It also means we keep our priorities consistent each year – the only thing that changes is the target and focus areas for each priority. Below you can see our strategy document and I will do a separate post on the target setting we do each season.
