The Kaizen Cycle, or how to improve everything

Like so many others, I love to read. I read for work, and I read for pleasure as well. I read at least every night a couple of pages even when I didn't have time all day to read. During one of these times, I came across the Kaizen principle. One of these Japanese things that made sense and that I followed already in my motto. My motto is love it, leave it, or change it.

But what does this all mean, you ask and it's quite simple, and my motto and the Kaizen principle go hand in hand. If you love what you do, just do it; if you don't love it, change it or leave. The Kaizen principle goes a similar way; it's made for companies and asks to involve employees. Ask them about problems they might have at work with the current systems they have. Ask them to offer solutions to it. Many companies already do that and even provide prices or money when a new process saves time or money. I was at one place where they paid out 10% of what a new process could save, and some guy saved the company several million a year.

When you get solutions, test the solutions and regularly measure and analyze the results. Maybe they work, maybe they make it worse, or maybe there is no change in results at all.

If you have a positive result, stick with it, deploy it everywhere it can be deployed, and start the process at the beginning again.

While this sounds like common sense, not everyone is doing that, and sometimes people don't want any input from others. But this 3rd party input is what can show you a different perspective on things, and this might be what can give you the option to improve a process. Even when it doesn't improve the process, you will be sure that now more people know and understand the process, and this by itself can improve the process.

So no matter what position you have in a company, see if you can ask people to try out the Kaizen principle and see what improvements or teamwork can come out of it.