Put kaizen first

Ever since I’ve studied lean I remember being confronted with a simple question: kaizen first, or kaizen later when all work has been done. This seems like an innocuous question but it hides the radical difference between kaizen and process improvement. Kaizen is practiced by the people who do the work themselves. Kaizen means thinking about one’s work, identifying waste we ourselves create, solve problems until we find the root misconceptions and try countermeasures until we discover a better way of handling things. Kaizen is a personal development practice: it involves observation, reflection, creativity, initiative – it stretches your thinking and cultivates both intuition (visualizing a different process) and pragmatic action (trying out new ways).

Process improvement, by contrast, is about managers fixing the process. This is what managers are about: they tell others what to do. The manager or process expert will look at the process, figure out the flaw or see the opportunity to do things differently, maybe with a bit of clever, newer tech and then get the operating team to apply. This is how we’ve been “modernizing” industry since Frederick Taylor applied management methods developed for the productivity of slave plantations to industrial work. And certainly, processes are?modernized?that way – but where does that get us??

The scope of our collective problem is now so wide it doesn’t fit in our heads – but, in the spirit of Christmas and self-reflection, let’s try? Certainly, we have modernized every process, but as we can see every service is going backwards. MBA-management has generated untold profits while critical infrastructures are retrenching every year to the point we often can no longer see how to reinvest – hospitals, trains, schools, the amounts involved to get them back to good working conditions seem out of our collective reach. People are still leaving the workforce because they simply can’t find anything for them in what is offered.?

Now imagine a counterfactual, a simple thought experiment. Imagined that we would have convinced our largest companies, starting with the energy companies, to adopt Toytoa’s “people development first” approach. What would have been the impact? First, we would have far people engaged in doing their job right and involved in working with their colleagues. Secondly, they would keep a customer focus and fight to maintain services to users come what may. Thirdly, these people would understand Mura, Muri, Muda and make sure maintenance happens before modernization. Greater customer focus, more engaged people, better maintenance – all logical conclusions from adopting “kaizen first.”

Leadership is supposedly about asking the right questions. Sure enough, when a question resonates with a large audience, large things happen. But if we look at the outcomes of such leadership moment, we can see that looking for a “final solution” to some larger issue rarely leads us to a better place. Yes, some leadership moments have been salutary and led to great improvement in human quality of life, but many have been just as destructive – some horrifyingly so.?

The lean question that has never found its audience is not whether we should improve processes by looking at organizations as machines and fixing their faulty parts, but whether management activity should really be to develop people, to support each individual’s efforts to stretch their knowledge, thinking and leadership so that that contribute more to the collective effort and, together, create a social program worth joining. A culture is cultivated: you grow trees, you don’t replace parts of a machine.?

Then lean system is an powerful framework for development. It asks the right questions:

1. How can we improve our contribution to customer satisfaction? What is the kaizen we could try?
2. How can improve our contribution to first pass quality? What is the kaizen we could try?
3. How can improve our contribution to shorter lead-times? What is the kaizen we could try?
4. How can we improve our contribution to workload/capacity balance? What is the kaizen we could try?
5. How can we improve our contribution to on-the-job training? What is the kaizen we could try?
6. How can we improve our contribution to people’s engagement in kaizen? What is the kaizen we could try?
7. How can we improve our contribution to people handling and managing their own workshops with 5S and TPM? What is the kaizen we could try?
8. How can we improve our contribution to general problem-solving skills? What is the kaizen we could try?

The?Toyota Production System?framework is a set of questions to challenge your own thinking about your own contribution. There is nothing to be done yet, just reflect. Then, you can ask yourself how you are helping or hindering others in developing their own thinking.

These questions have one purpose: to orient and sustain the kaizen spirit. It has nothing to do with applying new tools and systems to feed the machine. It has nothing to do either with reinforcing rules and roles to assert our power over others. It’s about opening up thinking and acting spaces so that we defend our humanity against the machine: it shall not be our lord and master because we handle it, not the other way around. Adopting the kaizen spirit means that as a manager your first role is to develop others around you, help them grow personally and professionally to, altogether, create a better union, to support collective intelligence from individual learning. Kaizen is the method.?

As you round up 2022, look at what you got done and ask yourself: have I developed people around me? Did I have a plan to do so and how did that plan work out? Or have I fed the machine with new processes, new technologies, new budgets, new action plans to make it drier, colder and, in the end, weaker?

Dominant thinking is dominant simply because we agree with it. We’re asked to fix a process, we agree with it. We’re asked to cut a maintenance budget, we agree with it. We’re asked to tell people to just obey and never question, we agree with it. We don’t have to. Putting kaizen first mean protecting spaces for observation and discussion, for open mindedness and experimentation – spaces for people to behave as people, not AI chatbots. If we don’t recapture these learning spaces we will witness powerlessness and the diminishing returns of keeping everyone in the drone zone all the time will continue to manifest in all aspects of society. What you tolerate perpetuates, but at any single moment, you can change that: put kaizen first.?