Embracing change is often easier said than done. Organizations know they must evolve with their customers and marketplace to remain competitive. Still, despite the desire and intent, companies frequently struggle to follow through with the transformation, often reverting to the status quo.
Failing to break free from stagnant business practices can be demoralizing, but there is a solution. The Japanese philosophy of kaizen, or “change for the better,” promotes a mindset that embraces small incremental change that leads to significant organizational transformation.
Here’s how the kaizen principle generates meaningful change for teams, departments, and organizations.
What is kaizen?
Kaizen originated in the Japanese manufacturing sector during the late 1940s. The term derives from two Nihongo words: kai (change) and zen (good). Combined, they mean good change or improvement. Over the years, kaizen’s definition evolved to mean continuous improvement.
Post-war Japanese manufacturers developed kaizen after meeting American management expert W. Edwards Deming, who advocated that front-line workers should be responsible for quality control. Companies like Toyota took this idea and ran with it, establishing a corporate culture where all employees contribute meaningfully to operational improvements, gradually and methodically increasing productivity and efficiency.
As a result, Japanese companies saw tremendous improvement in everyday practices and worker engagement. These changes resulted in employees who were more fulfilled, energized, and safe at work.
Masaaki Imai introduced the concept of kaizen to Western businesses in his 1986 book, Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success. Since then, frameworks like agile project management, Lean manufacturing, and Six Sigma quality control have incorporated and adapted kaizen into their practices, increasing productivity, promoting innovation, and reducing waste while boosting worker engagement, accountability, and creativity.
Kaizen is a broad concept that applies to teams or individuals in any industry, professional discipline, or business area. It leverages several approaches, including value stream mapping and the total quality management framework. No matter how it’s applied, its primary purpose is to promote change through innovation, accountability, and purpose.
6 benefits of kaizen
Companies that adopt the kaizen mindset can expect significant improvements in the following areas:
- Productivity: Employees are encouraged to reject the status quo to find new and better ways of doing their jobs, boosting performance and effectiveness.
- Waste: Muda, mura, and muri are Japanese words describing three wasteful practices: resource consumption that doesn’t drive value, uneven operations, and overburdening equipment or employees. Workers are encouraged to target wasteful activities or systems for improvement or elimination.
- Quality management: Iterative improvements to manufacturing and development processes produce higher caliber outputs.
- Safety: Employees are responsible for ensuring their “gemba,” or workplace, is optimized for productivity and safety.
- Costs: By maximizing productivity, reducing waste, and using resources wisely, organizations significantly improve their bottom line.
- Customer satisfaction: The kaizen process expands employee awareness of customer requirements, ensuring products consistently improve while maintaining client delight.
How does kaizen work?
The kaizen philosophy asserts that improvement isn’t finite. Every product, practice, or procedure can undergo continuous refinement and evolution through small, iterative changes.
The seven-stage kaizen cycle is a systemic improvement process that identifies and implements continuous change. It encourages teams and individuals to treat inefficiencies and waste as opportunities to find creative solutions, test, and roll out improvements through a process similar to plan-do-check-act (PDCA) or Lean Six Sigma’s define-measure-analyze-improve-control (DMAIC) models. Here’s how kaizen works:
- Involve employees: Solicit input from affected staff to identify problems and potential improvements. Organize them into a team responsible for gathering and relaying information to other employees.
- List problems and issues: Use employee feedback, such as surveys and one-on-one meetings, to create a list of issues and potential opportunities for change.
- Brainstorm and select the best solution: Gather to present ideas that address the issue, no matter how outlandish. From those suggestions, select which solution to pilot.
- Test: Enlist a small audience to pilot the new solution, gradually implementing the program until fully established.
- Measure and analyze results: Determine which metrics the test audience will use to measure success. Create a plan to monitor progress, including points of contact and engagement campaigns to maintain interest. Evaluate the results.
- Adopt the solution if successful: Review the results of the pilot program. If they’re positive, launch a company-wide rollout.
- Repeat: Relaunch the process for another round of improvements.
The 5S kaizen principles for business
Kaizen’s 5S methodology lays the groundwork for a corporate culture that improves performance, security, and profitability. Applying these five principles creates an environment where employees can thrive.
- Seiri (sort): Organize workplace implements, separating necessary tools from the unnecessary and removing whichever ones aren’t needed.
- Seiton (set in order): Create orderliness by ensuring tools are accessible and logically arranged to optimize efficiency.
- Seisō (shine): Maintain a neat and uncluttered working area.
- Seiketsu (standardize): Implement a standardized cleaning system for the entire workplace.
- Shitsuke (sustain): Encourage employees to maintain these practices.
8 more kaizen principles
Kaizen requires more than systematic change and a clean workplace. The kaizen mindset achieves process improvement through collaboration and commitment rather than top-down control. The philosophy must be adopted at every organizational level to succeed, starting with the CEO.
Applying these core kaizen principles internalizes the mindset:
1. Avoid assumptions
Don’t guess. Back up every theory or hypothesis with data. That means understanding what changes you wish to make and defining success criteria.
2. Proactive problem-solving
Keep your eyes and mind open to opportunities for improvement. If there’s a chance for productive change, recruit others to brainstorm and test the solution. If successful, bring the idea and supporting data to management for company-wide implementation.
3. Correct your errors
Everybody makes mistakes. The only shame is failing to learn from them. If you find a fault in your work, fix it immediately. Failure teaches you what doesn’t work so you can discover what does.
4. Progress over perfection
Innovative ideas rarely work perfectly the first time. Still, a 1% improvement is progress. Keep moving forward by making incremental adjustments, and you’ll eventually achieve your goal.
5. Find the source of an issue
Conduct root cause analysis or a gemba walk to find the origin of an issue. Observing work without criticism or blame helps you assess the problem accurately so the team can enact productive change rather than applying a Band-Aid solution.
6. Seek many voices
Don’t limit yourself to a single perspective. Seek input from as many perspectives as possible. This will not only broaden your appraisal of the issue but also improve the decision-making process.
7. Creativity before capital
We’re often tempted to throw money at a problem. However, that approach frequently produces a short-term answer. Instead, leverage problem-solving skills and creativity to find a solution using existing resources.
8. Always do better
Continuous improvement is the path to learning and growth that will ensure you remain an asset to the company.
Kaizen events
Typically, a kaizen event is triggered by the discovery of a wasteful process or system. Examples include:
- Defects: Bugs or substandard outputs
- Overproduction: Creating more supply than demand
- Idleness: Employees or equipment that sit unused
- Under-utilized talent: Failing to take advantage of the skills at the company’s disposal
- Inefficient transportation systems: Getting products to store shelves takes too long
- Excess inventory: Increasing costs by warehousing too much product
Once identified, the business organizes a meeting to evaluate the issue, find its root cause, and brainstorm a solution.
Attendees of the three- to five-day problem-solving blitz should include anyone with relevant knowledge and the motivation to resolve the issue. The company could draft anyone – employees, managers, or executives – and charge them with brainstorming and implementing a solution that improves the process.
The best tools to support your kaizen initiatives
Put your plans for continuous improvement into action. Roadmap the project using Tempo’s Strategic Roadmaps application. A business-friendly roadmap can prioritize ideas, manage tasks, and track the company’s process improvement projects, keeping stakeholders aligned and informed.
Whether you’re using Kanban or Lean Six Sigma, Tempo has the solutions to support strategic organization and centralized team collaboration.
