Status rolls up, substance stays put

When you put a company's plan and work in one place, a fair question comes up: is this surveillance? A supervisor who writes a frank A3 wants to know who reads it. A manager who writes down a tough conversation wants to know where that goes.

If you don't answer this question, people will answer it for themselves. They will write less, soften what they write and report green.

The answer is a rule that you can state in five words: status rolls up, substance stays put.

What the rule means

Status is whether a goal is being met and how large the gap is. It's short, and people above you need it to run the company.

Substance is the working detail: the A3 with its counts, its five whys and its countermeasures that didn't work. It's the thinking of the person doing the job.

Status travels up on its own. Substance stays with the person who holds the work.

What the rule doesn't mean

The rule doesn't mean that the work is hidden from the people above. A supervisor can read the work of the people below, and needs to. A supervisor signs off the A3 steps, so a supervisor must read them.

The rule is about two other things: who owns the work and what travels up without anybody asking.

• Who owns it. The person who holds an A3 writes it. A supervisor questions it and signs it off, but doesn't write it.
• What travels. The owner's status goes up the chain automatically. The working detail doesn't get packaged into a report for the next level, and the next level after that.

If someone above wants more, the right move is to ask the person, or to read the work and then talk with the owner. That difference matters. Reading someone's A3 and then asking them about it is management. Quoting it in a meeting two levels up, before they know you read it, is what people mean by surveillance.

Why it helps the plan

The rule isn't only about being polite. It's how you keep your information honest.

• Honest A3s need room. A good A3 says, "My first theory was wrong." If people expect that sentence to land in the owner's inbox, they stop writing it.
• Senior leaders need less, not more. A COO with 30 managers below can't read everyone's A3 each week. A short list of goals and gaps shows where to ask questions.
• Ownership stays clear. If details travel up, decisions often travel up with them. The person closest to the problem stops solving it, and waits for a call from above.

A worked example

The company is fictional. It's a metal parts maker with 180 employees, one plant and two shifts. The numbers are made up to show the method. They aren't results.

The second-shift supervisor holds an A3 on first-hour scrap at the Line 2 press brake. Here is what each person sees in a typical week.

The second-shift supervisor writes the A3. In step 4, she writes that operators set the back gauge from memory, and that the setup sheets are out of date because nobody owns them. She knows that this could embarrass someone. She writes it anyway, because the sheet is about the process.

The production supervisor, her manager, reads the A3, since he signs off its steps. In their one-on-one, he asks about the setup sheets and helps her get an owner named.

The plant manager, one level up, sees the status: Line 2 scrap at 3.9% against 3.7%, with the owner's next step and date. That's all that reaches her on its own, and it's enough to run the monthly review.

The owner of the company sees that the on-time objective is on target and that the scrap objective has a gap. Two levels of detail stay out of the owner's morning.

Suppose the plant manager wants to know more about the scrap gap. She can read the A3. Then she should talk with the production supervisor and not go directly to second shift with a list of corrections. The information is open to her. The way she uses it decides whether people keep writing honestly.

How to put the rule in place

You can use this rule with paper, spreadsheets or software.

1. Write it down, and say who can read what. Don't leave it vague. People believe a specific list more than a general promise. Say plainly whether a manager can read the work below, and whether a peer can.
2. Define status for your company. Agree that status means the goal, the latest reading, the gap and the next step with a date.
3. Build the review around status. Your monthly chart holds status only. If a discussion needs detail, the owner brings it.
4. Train senior people on how to ask. Teach them to open with "What did you find?" and to go through the chain. This is the part that takes the most practice.
5. Watch what you do with bad news. The first time someone reports a miss, everybody watches what happens. That one moment teaches more than this article can.

Signs that the rule is breaking

• Managers prepare a separate version of the A3 for the people above them.
• A senior leader quotes someone's working notes in a large meeting.
• A3s stop naming real causes and start to sound the same.
• Supervisors ask, "Who's going to see this?" before they write anything.

If you see these signs, look at the behavior of senior people before you look at the people who are writing less. For more on this pattern, see common Hoshin failures.

How Run Hoshin handles this

Run Hoshin is built on this rule, with limits that you can check. You can read your own seat's work and the work of the seats below you. You can't read a peer's work. Company admins can read every seat. The A3 stays with the person who holds it, and a supervisor reads it and signs off its steps but doesn't write it. Nobody else in the company reads a private note. Our staff can read one only inside a logged visit, which needs your consent, and each read goes on your company's record. The app records numbers as people type or import them, and it doesn't compute a rollup of numbers.

The app goes less far than the example above in one way. It has no status-only chart. Anyone with seats below them can open a period report that gathers the work below, with root causes, countermeasures and action items. So the app enforces who writes and who can read. How people use what they read stays up to you. See what the app does not do yet.