Kaizen - Kaikaku - Kakushin

As a triathlete, I often see the world in threes. As a keen lean practitioner a lot of what I read is derived from Japanese management theory. In this case I am onto my third Japanese phrase,  well technically this will be 3 and 4 and 5. 

My title at Novavi  describes me as Kaizen Coach,  as is Aldo. Horia opted for Kaizen Artist taking the view that it is more art than science.

For my part, this is an extension of what I was involved in at Fraedom,  where I was the Agile Practice Lead a few years ago. This is now known as Kaizen Practice. At the time we sensed that Agile had become a problematic name and in particular the team of Scrum Masters in my care took issue with the perception of their relative status. Generally speaking I try to avoid associating my work with Agile, unless it is necessary to articulate what I do to a client who knows no better.

Kaizen forms the essence of how I think and operate in Triathlon. I am always seeking marginal gains, sometimes undiscernible such as taping over rivet heads in the pedals of my bike to reduce wind resistance in an Ironman. Ever since I started my own biohacking tech company back in 2004 I have been fascinated with what I can do to optimise how my body performs. To this day, and 20 Ironman races behind me, I am still finding ways to improve how I Swim, Bike, Run and recover. 

In the IT industry,  Agile has become rather diluted from its original intent, in any case many thought leaders,  such as Al Shalloway and Steve Tendon argue that Scrum and Agile do not take Lean, Flow, TOC and Systems Thinking into account. These are the basis of my formative learning before becoming a Scrum Master. Furthermore there are a handful examples of poor implementation,  which is especially the case that I have seen in Auckland,  New Zealand. I will soon be writing a blog on why it goes so horribly wrong for the “Kiwi Kilo” companies, those who have employee numbers in the thousands. 

So back to Fraedom,  the fintech subsidiary of Visa.  After a relatively short discussion with everybody involved, we decided to establish a new practice, that I would lead. With their ascent,  the Scrum Masters would become Kaizen Coaches. At the time I was very influenced by the ideas of James Clear in his book “Atomic Habits” and in particular that the emphasis of our mission should be continuously improving the way we operate. Of course Kaizen Coaches probably still had Scrum teams to lead and facilitate,  as well as others who operated in Kanban and even other approaches. 

My cursory glance at the use of this phrase led me to Motorola and their adoption of Lean 6 Sigma. When they pioneered this approach in the 1990s, Kaizen Coaches were a thing. However thought leaders in TPS, in particularly Mike Rother who wrote “Toyota Kata”,  pointed out that having a weekly Kaizen Meeting means that there are at best only 52 opportunities to improve every year and in fact the true essence of Kaizen is when the Andon Cord is pulled,  which can be hundreds of times per shift. 

When I have introduced Kaizen to other organisations in Auckland over the past few years, I have had a little resistance because of its previous use in 6Sigma. In particular, one CEO questioned whether this was the right term, after all,  a bank that he had previously worked at had tried Kaizen and it "didn’t seem to work". It was at this point that I reflected that perhaps there  wasn’t  a broad understanding of the spirit and essence of Kaizen.

Kaizen Literally means “Change for Good”. Taichi Ohno from Toyota was inspired by the approach the United States took in the Second World War with their Training Within Industry (TWI) Program. Observing a Toyota Production line one can observe micro improvements throughout the process, stimulated by the Andon cord (meaning lantern)

What I often see is that people approach change with the spirit of Kaikaku. This is more transformational and a step change. While Kaizen is all about the compound effect of marginal gains, Kaikaku is more aggressive. Sometimes this is appropriate however there is a risk that the change will be too radical and create inertia within the organisation.

This became a reality for me when I was consulting at a tech company last year. As a change initiative we created a team of “Kaizen Ambassadors” who were from a cross section of the organisation so that as a team they could sense the entire system. We generally, and quite loosely, adopted the patterns of Agility Path, or EBM, Evidence Based management from Scrum.org. That is,  a cross functional team who would pull from a backlog of change and iterate towards an improved target condition. 

The pattern I observed that generally emerged was that the initiatives that we pulled in were generally large in nature, that one might discern an improvement at their outcome. This is not to say that the changes were not valuable or that the organisation desperately needed to address at this level. My point is that this is more like Kaikaku than Kaizen. 

A similar thing happens with organisations that might have a Kaizen initiative and meet weekly. Even a Kaizen ‘event’ sounds large. My assertion is that true Kaizen is changes and improvements that are of this size are probably more like Kaikaku in nature. Nothing wrong with Kaikaku. My suggestion is to also try Kaizen. It is the small things that are easy to effect that compound to make a big change over a sustained period of time. As with many things consistency trumps intensity.

While researching for this article,  I stumbled over another 'K': Kakushin. This is where we don’t improve from the current state to a new state, instead there is an entire recreation. There is a link here,  (where I also borrowed the header image), which explains it a better than I can. This comes with a hat tip to the author Adam Mitchel

https://adammitchell.co.uk/2018/01/24/kaizen-kaikaku-kakushin-whats-the-difference/

I am going to create a list of changes and, in my own view, define them as either Kaizen,  Kaikaku or Kakushin. In the mean time I’d like to challenge the reader to try and bias towards Kaizen where possible. Think big and start small,  learn fast.

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