The title of this article is a search term that recently hit The Lean Thinker site. It’s an interesting question—and interesting that it gets asked.
“Kaizen” is now an English word—it’s in the OED—and defined as such: “Noun. A Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement of working practices, personal efficiency, etc. Origin. Japanese, literally ‘improvement.’”
Let’s talk a bit about that “Japanese, literally ‘improvement’” bit.
Jon Miller of the Kaizen Institute was raised in Japan and offers up this nice breakdown of the meaning behind the meaning. As he explains:
• Kai = Change. The word is made from two characters, “self” and the picture “to whip.” You can see the stripes across the poor fellow’s back. So change is something you do to yourself.
• Zen = Good. In this case a sacrificial lamb, which means “righteous,” is offered between two characters for “word.” In this case “word” means clear and precise speech. So good sacrifice with precise speech all around it is “good.” The Zen character we are using is a simplified version. Also, Zen in this case is not the same character as Zen Buddhism.
• Kaizen = Change for the better. Or in our case, whip yourself so that you can make a nice sacrifice and always have clear speech and thoughts surrounding you.
As I understand it, in vernacular Japanese, kaizen is regarded as a business term. The word is not used in a day-to-day context.
From Jon’s explanation, there is also a very personal aspect to it. Change is something you impose on yourself.
Given all of that, kaizen is simply a word that generally refers to any systematic disciplined activity of improvement.
Kaizen events
Now things get tricky because here in the West, we’ve often regarded kaizen events and kaizen as the same thing. They aren’t. Although you can certainly make improvements with kaizen events, that isn’t the only way to improve things, and I’ll add it isn’t necessarily even the best way.
A typical Western kaizen event (and there are lots of variations, though most companies that use them tend to impose fairly rigorous attempts to standardize them) is a five-day focused effort with a 100-percent dedicated team.
The kaizen event leader is usually a specialist whose job is to plan and lead these things, and identify an improvement opportunity. He might be tasked by shop-floor management to tackle a chronic or painful problem, or he might be executing the “lean plan” that calls for a series of implementation events.
A kaizen leader’s job is to plan and execute the event, and to bring the expertise of “how to make improvements” to the workforce and their leaders.
Here’s the problem
Full-time kaizen event leaders typically get really good at seeing improvement opportunities, organizing groups for improvement, and quickly getting things done. They get good at it because they do it all the time.
Area supervisors might be involved in a kaizen event in their area a few times a year, if that. Some companies target having each employee in one kaizen event a year. That’s 40 hours of improvement. All at once.
The question is: What do they do (and learn) the other 1,900 hours that year? What do they do when something unexpected happens that disrupts the flow of work? Usually kaizen events don’t deal with how to manage on a day-to-day basis other than leaving an expectation for “standard work” in their wake.
But “standard work” is how you want the work to go when there aren’t any problems. When (not if) there are problems, what’s supposed to happen?
This is why many shop-floor leaders think kaizen is disconnected from reality. Reality is that parts are late, machines break, things don’t fit, Sally calls in sick, and the assembler has to tap out threads now and then. In the hospital, the meds are late, supply drawers have run out, and there is a safari mounted to find linens.
These things get in the way of running to the standard work. They are obstacles that weren’t discovered (or were glossed over as “resistance to change”) during the five-day effort.
The supervisor has to get the job done, has to get the stuff out the door, has to make sure the patients’ rooms are turned over, whatever the work is. And nobody is carving out time, or providing technical and organizational support (i.e., coaching), to help her use these problems as opportunities for developing improvement skills and smoothing out the work.
So sometimes, kaizen events implement changes, but they don’t necessarily do much for that whip-yourself personal drive for improvement.
The shift
We’re starting to see a shift as we realize those frontline leaders are actually the ones who need to be the experts. That’s where Toyota kata comes in—as a tool to learn to coach those leaders so they learn to keep the improvement going rather than just fighting erosion and working around problems.
First published Jan. 8, 2015, on the The Lean Thinker.
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