Hoshin Monthly Review Template

The Hoshin monthly review is the cadence that keeps strategy deployment from drifting between annual planning and year end. Its centerpiece is the bowling chart, a simple grid showing each improvement target plan versus actual month by month. The chart makes status visible at a glance and focuses the meeting on the gaps that matter.

When to use it

Run this every month against the annual Hoshin plan. It sits between the daily management huddles that handle the work and the quarterly reviews that adjust the plan itself. The monthly rhythm is where countermeasures are launched early enough to still change the year.

Who attends

Bring the priority owners and the leader they report to, four to ten people. This is a working review, not a broadcast, so keep it to those who own targets or can authorize countermeasures and resources.

How to run it

Open by reading the bowling chart so everyone sees plan versus actual in one view. Move quickly through green and yellow targets, then spend the real time on the red ones. For each red item, the owner explains the gap and its root cause, and the team agrees a countermeasure with an owner and a date. The discipline is to treat a missed plan as a problem to solve, not a number to explain away. Close by confirming actions and escalating anything beyond the team to resolve.

Facilitator tips

• Spend most of the meeting on red items, not on celebrating green.
• Demand a root cause for every miss, not a narrative of effort.
• Close every red item with a countermeasure, an owner, and a date.
• Escalate fast when a gap exceeds what the team can fix alone.

Common mistakes

• Reviewing activity instead of actual progress against the bowling chart.
• Explaining away red items rather than launching countermeasures.
• Spending the meeting on green targets that need no attention.
• Leaving without owners and dates, so the same reds return next month.

Keep deployment on pace every month. Run it in OrgTP and keep targets, status, and countermeasures live between reviews.