Lean Deployment, Leadership, and Culture
This section covers lean deployment, leadership, and culture. The exam tests whether you can design and sustain enterprise-wide deployment: strategy deployment, leader behaviors, daily management, and the cultural conditions that let improvement survive beyond a launch.
Strategy deployment
Hoshin kanri links three-to-five-year breakthrough objectives to annual objectives through an X-matrix: objectives, tactics, metrics, and owners. Catchball negotiates targets and resources up and down the organization. Review monthly or quarterly with hansei (reflection), not just status reporting.
Daily management and leadership
Tiered daily meetings with visual boards make abnormalities visible within hours. Leader standard work defines gemba time, audits, and coaching; the coaching kata builds problem-solving capability instead of dependence on experts. Middle managers are the linchpin: they translate strategy and must be developed, not bypassed.
Culture
Respect for people means designing work that uses judgment, building psychological safety to surface problems, and using nemawashi to build alignment before decisions. Metrics and incentives must reward flow and customer outcomes, not local utilization.
Worked example
A plant completes 120 kaizen events and raises 5S scores, yet on-time delivery is flat and inventory has risen. Reviews are monthly financials, and managers are rewarded for departmental utilization. Diagnosis: events are disconnected from strategy, and daily management rewards local output. Fix: two breakthrough objectives, A3s with owners, leader standard work with gemba walks, tiered boards, and a utilization metric replaced by flow and delivery.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating deployment as a communication plan or tool rollout.
- Delegating lean to a central CI team while line leaders stay unchanged.
- Copying another company's system without adapting to context.
- Changing structures without changing metrics and incentives.