A leadership team sets a target, sends it down the organisation and receives a row of green status boxes. That may show agreement, or it may show that nobody has found a safe way to explain the missing resources. Catchball is intended to make that conversation part of planning.
In its description of strategy deployment, the Lean Enterprise Institute explains a dialogue between managers and teams about targets, time and resources. Ideas move back and forth rather than travelling only as instructions. The aim is a workable commitment, not merely a more polite announcement.
Send a proposal people can return
Imagine a service team asked to cut response time by a third. A useful first proposal states the problem, the measure and why it matters. The team then returns evidence about demand, staffing, handovers and competing work. It might suggest a smaller pilot or identify a dependency on another department.
This fictional example is not a formula for setting the target. It shows what the exchange needs: information that can change the plan. Asking for feedback after every important decision has already been fixed is not much of an exchange.
Keep the discussion concrete
- Which assumption is being challenged?
- What evidence would clarify it?
- What work or resource must move?
- Who has authority to make that trade-off?
- When will the revised proposal return?
Separate a constraint from a preference. “We have no access to that dataset” requires a different response from “we would rather use another dashboard”. Both can be discussed without pretending they are equivalent obstacles.
Close the loop visibly
Record the agreed objective, owner, resources, unresolved risks and review point. Also record suggestions that were not adopted and the reason. Otherwise people may mistake silence for agreement or keep reopening a settled issue because the decision was never communicated.
Catchball does not remove accountability or require every person to like the final plan. It makes the route to that plan more informed. A strong result is a target that the responsible team understands, with explicit conditions for revisiting it when the assumptions change.