What is kaizen and how it helps people and companies become better

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

A Japanese approach to productivity and continuous improvement.

What is Kaizen

This is the Japanese business philosophy of What is Kaizen / Investopedia, which allows you to build and organize work in the company. The word "kaizen" has several meanings, the main one being continuous improvement.

Kaizen itself does not offer a ready-made turn-based strategy that can be followed to keep things going well. There is no universal instruction manual for kaizen either. Rather, it is a set of ideas and principles to build upon.

The basic postulate of kaizen goes something like this: small steps in the right directions help you get a lot.

This means that to achieve impressive results, you do not need fundamental innovations, but slow and gradual, but daily work.

It is believed that kaizen was first introduced by the Toyota Production System / Toyota at Toyota after World War II. And this helped to restore production, debug workflows and increase profits. Therefore, this system is mainly used in companies and industries. Although personal kaizen is also possible in principle.

What are the elements of kaizen

Since there is no official "bible" of kaizen, there is some confusion in the descriptions of this approach.

For example, on the website of the Kaizen Institute (yes, there is one) the author of the book “Kaizen. The Key to Japanese Success Strategy”Masaaki Imai gives the Definition of Kaizen / Kaizen Institute five elements that are also called the core of kaizen.

1. Get to know your client. This means that you need to clearly represent the portrait of the person to whom you provide services or sell goods: their values, desires, needs and pains.
2. Get rid of the trash. Kaizen is closely related to the concepts of zero waste and lean manufacturing. However, this principle can be understood more broadly: to strive not to use anything superfluous in work, to take only what is really needed, to destroy both physical and informational waste.
3. Go to "production". The original uses the word gemba, which can be translated from Japanese as "the place where the work takes place." The essence of this element of kaizen is that the leader must have a good understanding of work processes and devote all his efforts to introducing changes in the first place there.
4. Rely on facts. On statistics, changes in significant indicators and specific numbers, and not on their own feelings.
5. Inspire your team. In this case, we are talking about setting specific goals for people and helping them move towards them.

In different sources, there are several more principles that are associated with kaizen.

1. Collect employee opinions. Kaizen assumes that each team member needs to be heard if he has something to say. You can brainstorm together, do one-on-one interviews, or put up a suggestion box. Ideas that people come up with should be considered and slowly implemented if they are worth it.
2. Give up perfectionism. Better a leisurely day-to-day job than trying to do everything flawlessly.
3. Look for the root of the problem. Difficulties and problems cannot be taken for granted. You need to ask yourself at least five times why this is happening in order to get to the bottom of it and find a solution.
4. Avoid the status quo. This means that it is necessary to strive not for stability and balance, but for continuous development.
5. Maintain personal discipline. Each team member needs to follow the rules of time management and work on himself.
6. Build team spirit. People in the company should have common, clear goals, values and principles. It inspires, motivates, helps everyone to move in the same direction and work harmoniously.

Finally, the third set of kaizen principles concerns lean manufacturing. It consists of five S:

• Seiri (sorting). Sort work tools, approaches and tasks, identify what is really not needed.
• Seiton (systematization). Keep your work area in order, find a well-defined position for each tool and object. And it doesn't matter so much whether you work at the machine, at the easel or in the office at the table.
• Seiso (cleanliness). The workplace must be clean. Remove it at the end of each day.
• Seiketsu (standardization). Take the previous three steps to automatism and make them the standard.
• Shitsuke (improvement). Check how efficient the system is. Troubleshoot issues and improve workflows.

How to implement changes using kaizen

This system strongly encourages the What is Kaizen / Investopedia approach PDCA (Plan - Do - Check - Act), or, as it is also called, the Deming - Shewhart management cycle. It is clear from the abbreviation that it consists of four stages:

1. Plan. Change should not be spontaneous, you always need to first analyze the situation and draw up a strategy.
2. Take action. In the case of kaizen, this means trying to implement some small improvement.
3. Check it out. You should study how the previous step affected the company's performance or personal results, compare the indicators, talk with colleagues who are affected by the changes.
4. Correct. If necessary, you need to eliminate the problems that have arisen, slightly change the approach or completely abandon the improvements if they did not work.

How to be more productive with kaizen

Initially, this philosophy is aimed at companies and large industries, but its principles work well M. F. Suárez-Barraza, J. Ramis-Pujol, S. Mi Dahlgaard-Park. Changing quality of life through the Personal Kaizen approach: A qualitative study / International Journal of Quality and Service Sciences and for each individual.

Writer Robert Maurer, author of Step by Step Towards Achievement. The Kaizen Method,”and blogger How to apply Kaizen in your personal life / Medium, Gail Kurzer-Myers, offer several ideas on how to introduce kaizen into everyday life.

1. Set yourself small goals

“Launching your own business” or “starting to earn twice as much” sounds like something scary and overwhelming. But breaking down those big goals into many smaller ones makes it much easier and clearer.

For example: “collect ideas for your business”, “study the market and competitors”, “calculate costs”, “draw up a business plan”. The more you manage to crush this huge block, the better.

This approach may already be familiar to you: in classical time management it is called "eating an elephant in pieces."

2. Ask yourself small questions

Directions like “Start yoga every morning” are bad. But the right questions help to find motivation and understand yourself:

• What am I missing to do yoga every morning?
• What can I buy to make the task easier and more enjoyable, maybe a new rug and nice comfortable clothes?
• What small steps will help me develop this habit - collecting clothes and a rug in the evening, reading a couple of articles about the benefits of yoga, going to bed early?

3. Take small steps

Robert Maurer gives a good example in his book. The doctor tried to persuade the patient to exercise regularly for 30-60 minutes a day. The patient was clearly not enthusiastic about the idea. Then she was asked to simply march in front of the TV for only 1 minute every evening. And she succeeded quite well. Once such "training" became a habit, the patient gradually increased the time and difficulty of the exercise and thus made sport a part of her life.

So small steps are the key to big changes.

4. Get rid of trash

And in every sense of the word. Throw away unnecessary papers, broken brushes, and broken blenders. Remove programs you are not using. Eliminate time wasters and change destructive habits. Work with attitudes and thoughts that drain you and spoil your mood.

5. Keep your work area clean and tidy

Each thing has its own place. It disciplines, helps to tune in to work and organize thoughts.

6. Get better every day

The main idea of kaizen is that change should happen every day. Albeit tiny, not always noticeable.

Walking 10 steps more than usual, learning two English words instead of one, reading a few pages of a book, spending 5 minutes less time on your phone than yesterday - all this matters and will ultimately lead to good results.

This article was originally published in January 2013. In August 2021, we updated the text.