“It took the management team 30 days to develop the strategy, it only took the organization 30 seconds to misunderstand it.”
This quote was shared with me by an experienced business leader and for me, it captures one of the most common and costly leadership challenges: the disconnect between strategic intent and organizational understanding and involvement.
Many organizations invest significant time and effort crafting a strategy, but when it’s time to execute the strategy, it’s often misunderstood, misaligned or met with passive compliance rather than active commitment.
What causes this to happen? It usually has something to do with the fact the strategy isn’t shared, it's announced.
A very effictive way to mitigate such a situation is to approach strategy with a much more collaborative leadership approach like Catchball. Catchball is part of the Hoshin Kanri strategic process but it can be applied more broadly.
Imagine you threw a ball between stakeholders in the organization. The ball is passed back and forth until there’s shared understanding and commitment.
As a general rule in most organizations:
• Leaders share strategic objectives and the reasoning behind them.
• Teams are invited to provide input, raise challenges, and suggest what problems need to be solved to achieve those goals.
Catchball is not just about getting agreement, it’s about building clarity and shared purpose through respectful, fact-based discussion.
The Problem: Misunderstood Strategy
When you and your team haven’t had the chance to contribute to the strategy or when it is not communicated in a way that makes your role clear, it's easy to feel disconnected. When that disconnect happens, the signs show up in the following ways:
• You start working on the wrong things
• You feel unsure about what to prioritise
• You stay silent instead of speaking up
• Energy and engagement begin to fade
As a result, productivity drops and you risk spending time, resources, and focus on efforts that don’t move the business in the right direction.
So how do you close that gap between leadership and the rest of the organization?
Catchball: A Collaborative Way to Align Strategy
Catchball is a leadership approach that builds on open, two-way communication across all levels of the organization. It creates feedback loops, not just to clarify strategy but to foster engagement, ownership, and alignment.
Think of it as a metaphor: the strategic idea is the “ball” which is thrown between leaders and teams, refined through conversation and feedback then returned stronger and more aligned.
How Catchball Works
Effective Catchball conversations start with thoughtful questions like:
• What could prevent us from reaching our breakthrough objectives?
• How can I help you remove blockers?
• How do you think we can best contribute?
• What problems do you need help solving?
These questions shift the tone from “telling” to “partnering” with the end goal to have consensus among the stakeholders involved.
The Power of Consensus
Consensus means you reach a common understanding and collective buy-in, even if the final plan isn’t your first choice.
When you build consensus, you start pulling in the same direction as a team. You feel seen, heard, and part of the journey and that’s how real momentum begins.
Your Role as a Manager: Leading with the 4C’s
At the heart of Hoshin Kanri are the 4Cs: Clarity, Courage, Commitment, and Consensus. These principles help you turn strategy into meaningful action.
As a manager or part of the management team, you play a key role in fostering the 4Cs throughout the Catchball process, you do this by:
1. Explaining the why behind the goals (Clarity)
2. Showing up consistently and follow through (Commitment)
3. Encouraging honest conversations and dissent (Courage)
4. Guiding the organization toward shared agreement and action (Consensus)
Catchball isn’t just a communication tool, it’s a leadership mindset that helps you balance direction with inclusion.
Catchball as a Strategic Leadership Practice
Catchball transforms the way you communicate and deploy strategy. Instead of a one-way broadcast, it becomes an ongoing, iterative conversation. It creates space for real engagement, allowing you and your team to contribute ideas, raise concerns, and build shared ownership of the path forward. This helps you focus on the real blockers to success.
It is not a one-time exercise, it's a continuous practice that helps you stay connected to your team and helps your team stay connected to the mission.
Putting the Approach into Practice
A global food company recently launched a new strategy aimed at reducing lead time across its product portfolio while also increasing the speed and efficiency of seasonal product launches. The intention was clear at senior leadership level, but as the message moved through the organization, it began to lose clarity. Production teams continued working to previous timelines, brand and marketing teams weren’t sure which launches to prioritize, and several departments hesitated to shift focus without understanding how the changes connected to their existing goals. The result was a slow start, growing uncertainty, and a noticeable drop in energy.
To re-engage the organization, the company introduced Catchball. Instead of repeating the message, leaders began structured conversations with teams across departments. The aim wasn’t to re-explain the strategy, but to understand how people had interpreted it, what felt unclear, and where the blockers were.
Through this dialogue, teams raised practical challenges, for example, the bottlenecks in the production line and what needs to be done to eliminate those to reduce the lead time. In this approach the management understood to have a cross-functional view on the challenges that were identified so all problems were managed with the end result in mind rather than dealing with them isolated from other teams and functions. What had initially felt like a top-down shift began to feel like a shared direction by including the bottom-up perspective.
Catchball helped the company turn understanding into alignment, and alignment into action.
Conclusion
Making strategy work is not just about setting the right goals. It is about creating the conditions your team needs to engage with them. Catchball supports that by acting not as a one-off tool or leadership trick, but as a communication habit that builds clarity, accountability, and alignment.
So ask yourself:
Do you have enough clarity on the strategy to guide your team in removing the real blockers?