What is Catchball?

Catchball is a collaborative communication process used to discuss goals and strategies through a series of back-and-forth conversations between different levels within an organization. The goal is to reach consensus and ensure that high-level objectives are practically achievable by incorporating feedback from the people who do the work. This iterative approach fosters mutual engagement and ensures that the final plans are both strategically aligned and realistic.

In a boardroom, the management team begins a game of “catchball” by proposing a strategic goal: to reduce document turnaround time across the entire company by 30%. The Chief Operating Officer discusses this goal with the department managers in a conference room to assess its feasibility. Instead of simply imposing a new software requirement, the COO asks, “What specific bottlenecks in your current archiving processes would prevent us from achieving this goal by the end of the third quarter?” This marks the start of the first “throw.” The managers indicate that the current archiving relies heavily on external physical storage and that administrative staff in the office are currently burdened by a manual approval process for supplier invoices.

The managers then move the discussion to the open-plan office to consult with the administrative staff and the receptionists. The administrative staff suggest that processing time could be significantly reduced if the company implemented an automated digital signature system for internal approvals, but they note that the reception desk does not have the necessary high-speed scanning equipment to digitize incoming mail immediately. This counterproposal is brought back to the director. The final plan, which is now the result of several rounds of brainstorming, includes a budget for two high-speed scanners and a revised schedule with a one-week training period. Because the staff on the shop floor helped develop the strategy, the final plan is grounded in the practical realities of daily office operations. This ensures a high level of buy-in and a realistic path toward achieving the 30% reduction target.

To implement the brainstorming method in your office:

1. Identify an overarching objective, such as reducing the turnaround time for processing customer requests.

2. Present the objective to the employees carrying out the task and ask for a "countermeasure" or feedback on what resources are missing.

3. Adjust the objective or the allocation of resources based on their input, and repeat the process until both management and employees agree that the objective is achievable.

We have templates such as the Horizontal Consensus Matrix in our downloads section to help you through this process. Would you like to get started on your own without help but aren’t sure how? You’d be wise to purchase Mark Reich’s book *Managing on Purpose *. Mark spent years as an executive at Toyota and was responsible for this area there. He has written the most comprehensive book on Hoshin Kanri, of which Catchball is an important part. We offer both the original English version and a Dutch edition in our webshop.

Would you like us to guide you, your team, or your organization through a Hoshin Kanri masterclass? Then take a look at our page about this masterclass. It was developed in collaboration with Mark Reich and numerous colleagues from the Lean Network, using *Managing on Purpose* as a starting point.