Part 3 of a series on flow-oriented strategy execution. Read Part 1: Flow as your truth teller and Read Part 2: From Truth to Action.
Most leadership teams spend weeks building a plan and a single morning sending it out. What comes back is rarely the plan they wrote, and it is easy to read that as resistance. Catchball starts from the opposite assumption, that the feedback is where ownership is created. Nordwave’s leadership team found this out the way most teams do, by watching a good plan start shifting the moment it left the room.
At Nordwave Industries, Henrik’s year-one plan sat on his desk. It was the product of three weeks of drafting six strategic sub-initiatives, three of them under Lars’s breakthrough of reducing new-product time-to-market from eleven months to six. Every item had an owner, a target, and a deadline. On paper, it was a good plan.
Mette walked past his office, glanced at the printed pages, and smiled slightly.
“It looks good,” she said. “But the moment it lands on their desks, it changes again.”
Henrik looked up. “Whose desks?”
“Everyone else’s.”
In the first part of this series we watched Nordwave’s leadership team discover that only five of eighteen initiatives were actually delivering. In the second part we watched them cut the portfolio and put the Bowler Chart on the wall. This is the part between those two moments, where a plan that lives in the CEO’s office becomes work that lives in the organization.
This phase is called Catchball and is one of main phases in a full Hoshin Kanri planning cycle. This is where a plan stops being leadership’s and starts becoming the organization’s. It’s arguably the discipline that most implementations skip.
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What Catchball Actually Is
Catchball is one of those terms that sounds strange until you see it in action. The name comes from the image of a baseball being thrown between two people, back and forth. Leadership tosses an idea to the departments, the departments toss it back with adjustments, leadership catches, adjusts, and throws again. Not once or twice, but as many times as it takes until every level of the organization is holding the same ball.
What it produces, when it’s done well, is a plan that every stakeholder can point to and say, “I see myself in this.” They didn’t write it themselves, but their thinking is visibly reflected in it.
The common pattern is that leadership drafts a strategy in a room, sends it out as a directive, and then wonders why execution is slow, resistance high, and outcomes disappointing. There’s nothing wrong with the plan but it still fails because it wasn’t theirs.
Prepare, Present, Adjust, Agree
Nordwave’s leadership ran catchball on the year-one plan using a four-step pattern. Each step matters which means skip one and the whole thing collapses back into directive.
The catchball pattern in four steps. The A3, a single sheet, is the artifact that captures the progress and final outcome.
1. Prepare: start build an A3
Lars, who owned the time-to-market breakthrough (from eleven months to six over three years), spent a week before his first catchball conversation building what Toyota calls an A3. It is a single sheet of paper - literal A3 size, hence the name - laying out his thinking. It covers the problem he was trying to solve, the evidence he had, his current hypothesis about how to close the gap, the parts of that hypothesis he was uncertain about, and the questions he was hoping stakeholders could help answer.
Lars’s draft annual goal on the A3 was deliberately not “reduce time-to-market by X months this year.” The outcome would only show in years two and three which was a lag too long to steer against. So he needed a leading indicator that would drive the behavior change now. The goal he proposed instead was “drive parallel design review adoption from zero to 100 percent on all new-product programs.” The logic was that if that landed, the time-to-market improvement would follow.
What was on that page mattered as much as what wasn’t; not final answers, not a case for buy-in, but his reasoning made visible. If you only show conclusions, you can only get agreement or disagreement. Show your reasoning instead, and you get other people’s reasoning added to yours, which is far more valuable.
2. Present: show your thinking
The following conversations were carefully planned. Every stakeholder got the A3 in advance along with the same four questions: is the annual goal relevant to what you actually deliver, is the level right, what problems must be solved to reach it, and what has leadership missed? Written input came first, then a discussion built on their answers. That discipline mattered as much as the content, because by asking everyone the same questions the input could be compared across functions.
He took the A3 first to Pia, who runs sales. Rather than pitch it, he walked her through his reasoning, showed her what he was uncertain about, and asked her to challenge the parts she thought were wrong. Pia looked at the timeline he had drawn and immediately said something Lars hadn’t heard before:
“Your rollout to segment A is in April. But our launch window in segment A is March. If you’re right about the timeline, we miss the whole year.”
That was one piece of information Lars didn’t have. He wrote it on the A3.
He did the same thing with Andreas in engineering. Andreas didn’t push back on the annual goal itself; he pushed back on the assumption underneath it. “You’ve written 100% adoption. The NPI core team can’t absorb this on top of the two ongoing programs. We’d have to stop one of them, or the reviews will slip and the number becomes theatre.”
Another piece Lars didn’t have. He wrote it on the A3.
3. Adjust: integrate stakeholders feedback
Between the second conversation and the third, Lars redrew the plan. The rollout to segment A moved earlier, one of the ongoing NPI programs was proposed for deferral, and a new role - a launch coach embedded in the NPI core team - was added to cover the capacity gap. The annual goal itself stayed intact at zero to 100 percent parallel design review adoption, what changed was the path to it. None of the adjustments had been in the original draft, every one of them emerged from the conversations themselves.
The A3 now carried three colors: his original thinking in black, Pia and Andreas’s contributions in blue, and his adjusted plan in red. Each layer accumulated on top of the last rather than erasing it.
4. Agree: sign-off with clarity and consensus
The final catchball conversation was with the full Nordwave leadership team. Lars presented the adjusted plan and the reasoning behind every change. Pia could see her Q1 launch window reflected in the milestone plan, Andreas could see his capacity concern addressed by the launch coach role. Henrik could see that the year-end target hadn’t changed, only the path to get there.
Because everyone in the room felt the plan was theirs, not Lars’, they signed off.
Why the A3 Matters
The A3 is one of the most underused Toyota tools. It looks trivial being just a sheet of paper, but its power comes from the constraint. Everything about a problem has to fit on one page: the problem statement, current condition, target condition, hypothesis, countermeasures, predictions, and risks.
The constraint forces clarity and makes your reasoning visible. Someone else can look at it and immediately see where you might be wrong, where you’re uncertain, and where the leaps are, which is exactly what you want during catchball.
Compare that to a pitch deck, where slides hide the underlying reasoning under one point per slide, transitions, “next question.” An A3 does the opposite, putting everything on the same page so that nothing hides.
If you can’t fit your thinking on one A3, your thinking isn’t ready yet.
Consensus, Not Agreement
There’s a phrase from Toyota that took me years to fully understand which is that the goal of catchball is consensus, not agreement.
The distinction is subtle but critical. Agreement means everyone endorses the specific decision, and if someone changes their mind next week, agreement dissolves. Consensus means everyone supports the way forward - even people whose ideas didn’t win - because they participated in the reasoning that produced it.
Nordwave’s leadership didn’t all agree on every element of the final plan. Andreas would have preferred to defer a different NPI program than the one that was actually deferred, and Pia would have preferred a more aggressive Q1 target. Neither got exactly what they wanted, yet both signed off anyway, because they had seen how their input shaped the plan and trusted the reasoning even when they disagreed with a specific choice.
That trust is the real product of catchball. When the plan hit its first real obstacle in May - as we saw in Part 2, with the parallel-review rollout slipping - Pia and Andreas didn’t retreat to old positions or blame the plan. They helped fix it, because it was still theirs.
Ask Yourself
Before your next strategic plan lands on your team’s desks, these are three questions worth sitting with:
1. If you handed your plan to one skeptical stakeholder tomorrow, could they point to their own thinking anywhere in it?
2. Do you have a single-page artifact, an A3 or something like it, that shows your reasoning, not just your conclusions?
3. Are you optimizing for agreement (which fades under pressure) or consensus (which holds)?
If the honest answer to any of these is no, catchball is likely what’s missing.
What Happened Next
The plan Nordwave’s leadership eventually executed was a plan shaped by Pia, Andreas, Lars, and half a dozen others across the organization. Six months later, four of the six sub-initiatives had delivered. One had been replanned mid-year, and one was still in flight but on track.
On Lars’s breakthrough specifically, the year-end numbers followed the discipline. Parallel design review adoption reached 87 percent on new NPI programs - short of the 100 percent target, but a clear signal that the leading indicator was working. The first two programs run under the new method delivered in 8.5 months, down from an eleven-month baseline.
The version of the plan that survived was the version the organization owned. That, more than any single tool or template, is the real reason Hoshin Kanri works when it works, and fails when it fails.
Where To Start
If your last strategy didn’t survive contact with the organization - if it landed on desks and quietly disappeared - catchball is likely what was missing. It’s the discipline that turns a leadership team’s plan into shared work.
If you recognize Henrik’s situation - a plan that looked good on paper but started shifting the moment it reached other people’s desks - that’s exactly the gap catchball closes. At Hups, we help leadership teams design and facilitate the process, from building the first A3 to the disciplined pursuit of consensus across every level of the organization.
Read Part 1 in the series: Flow as your truth teller.
Read Part 2 in the series: Flow as your truth teller.
Watch the webinar "When Everyone Is Busy but Strategy Isn’t Delivering"
Or:
Book a 30-minute conversation with Fredrik Fjellstedt
