“All changes, even positive ones, are scary. Attempts to reach goals through radical or revolutionary means often fail because they heighten fear. But the smalls steps of Kaizen disarm the brain’s fear response, stimulating rational thought, and creative play."

One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way – Robert Maurer Ph.D.

The word Kaizen comes from the Japanese words for “Good” and “Change.” In businesses and other organizations, Kaizen refers to activities that continually improve all processes and involve every employee from the executive team to front line workers. Kaizen, as a foundational business philosophy, was first embraced by Japanese manufactures after the Second World War.

The term Kaizen became known around the world through the works of Masaaki Imai. He pend the groundbreaking book KAIZEN™: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success.

Masaaki Imai described Kaizen simply. “Kaizen means to find a better way and revise the current standard. Thus, maintaining and improving the standard becomes the main task of management.”

Core Principles

Kaizen isn’t a prescription for improvement; instead, it is a way of seeing the world. It is the basis of many improvement methodologies, including Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, and the Toyota Production System. The most essential principles of Kaizen are:

• Every process can be improved
• Continuous improvement is necessary to be competitive
• Defects and failures are most often the fault of imperfect processes, not people
• Every member of the organization must have a role in improvement
• Small changes can have an enormous impact

As Imai put it, “The starting point for improvement is to recognize the need. This comes from the recognition of a problem. If no problem is recognized, there is no recognition of the need for improvement. Complacency is the archenemy of Kaizen.”

There are also five instructions of Kaizen:

• Know your customer – Identify their interests so that you can enhance their experience.
• Let it flow – Everyone in the organization should aim to create value and eliminate waste.
• Go to the Gemba – Value is created in the places where work is done. Leaders should go there.
• Be transparent – Performance improvements should be tangible and visible.
• Empower people – Set goals for teams and give them the tools to achieve them.

Kaizen in the Wild

To understand what happens when the Kaizen mindset takes hold, we spoke with some of our clients about their experiences with continuous improvement. Here’s what they shared:

“We’re a 220-bed community hospital,” Brian Deiter, CEO of Mary Greenly Medical Center, said. “We just want to make it simple – let’s get the people closest to the work involved in improving the work. And if we do that over and over again, we do it daily, one of the things we’ve said is we want to get better at getting better.”

Jonathan M. Bykowski, of Array Architects, thinks about Kaizen this way, “It’s a goal that everyone feels empowered and prepared to question their work processes and implement change. We want to be a culture of structured experimentation every day.”

Here are others sharing the kinds of improvements their Kaizen program inspires:

Laura Roe, CFO of TBM Carriers, a long haul trucking company, shared how adhering to the principles of Kaizen can impact the bottom line, “We made a project to reduce our fuel costs, which is probably one of our largest expenses in the company. What was important was not only the negotiations, but also getting our drivers to go to the right fuel stations. We’ve seen so far about $100,000 per month in savings - about a $1.2 million savings per year - from that project.”

Hopefully, this brief introduction to Kaizen has been helpful. It is a brilliantly simple way to capitalize on the wisdom and creativity of each individual to implement small changes that have a significant impact. All of the publications we’ve mentioned in this post are excellent resources for a deeper dive.