Kaizen, or “Good Change”, is more about the changes that happen in each person than those that happen in the physical processes…
I’ve seen a lot of kaizen “event” bashing recently. I understand it, I really do. Let’s face it: the problem with the way most organizations “do” kaizen - it is purely event based, often consultant- or specialist-lead, and too few and too far between. And it stays this way, forever.
Lean purists tell everyone, “everyone is responsible for kaizen” and “kaizen happens continuously, on the gemba, don’t wait for an event.”
When I hear this, I envision an ideal state: where we walk to the gemba, and see workers experimenting with their processes, improving them and their products on the spot. Engineering, Quality and Management personnel are there to help remove barriers for the workers to achieve the next level of performance. Everyone knows that it is not just “ok to stop the line” and fix the problem right now... its expected. After all, identifying the root cause of problems, and preventing recurrence, and learning from it to bring more perfect value to our customers is the most important thing to do right now.
Yet, I think there is some risk when we speak of the ideal state - with workers leading improvement of their own work, and documenting the new standard, training others to the new standard and improving again... if we forget to think about “how” we get to get to that point. In other words, where are we, right now? What is our Current State? If our workforce - from shop floor to CEO - is part of a Traditional Management structure dominated by command and control style leadership and all it entails, without adequate skill and support, turning folks loose to “solve their own problems” is a recipe for chaos and disaster.
Let’s take a step back and think about where do the skills to do these things come from, if not from being taught the skills and given opportunity to try them out? This is where kaizen “events” can come into play. I have used kaizen “events” successfully over many years to train the workforce and create “space” for the cultural shift to lean. It can and does work when kaizen is driven by problem solving, strategy deployment, system kaizen... when it is aggressive and frequent, when it is used to drive skills into the workforce and is part of an overall business transformation.
Give people the space and time to learn and practice skills. Coach them. Show them the potential and lend support by removing barriers. Let them gain confidence that they can do it. Very quickly you will find kaizen happening on the gemba in the holistic sense... not the event sense.
What is interesting is that I think most organizations fail to understand “why” they do events in the first place. Some of the reasons you may hear are:
“We do events to save money”
“We do events to change layouts”
“We do events to fix problems”
“We do events to involve our workforce”
It is undeniable that well-planned, well-executed kaizen can do all of these things and much more. So what is missing here?
Respect for People is often the element that is absent. When asked, very few people will say, “We do events to develop our people, so that we can learn the tools, techniques, and philosophies of the TPS. We want all of our people to improve their own work, and our ideal state is that improvement is done by everyone, every day... and every employee can leverage his or her creativity to make the processes better.”
The whole point of ever doing events in the first place should be so that you never have to do events at all... because everyone has the freedom, knowledge, skills and responsibility to improve.
©2020 Dawn A. Armfield, ValueFlo Consulting LLC
Meet the Author
Dawn Armfield is the founder and CEO of ValueFlo Consulting. Before forming ValueFlo, Dawn spent thirty years honing her skills in Leadership, Manufacturing Engineering and the Toyota Production System across a variety of industries. She has successfully lead lean transformations, has facilitated hundreds of System and Point Kaizen events, has authored several articles on lean and cultural transformation.
