I have just finished this great book called ‘make it stick’, The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger and Mark A. McDaniel.
One of the many interesting insights from the book, which very practically offers scientifically proven methods to enhance our learning, is around something called Kaizen.
Kaizen is the Japanese word for ‘improvement’ or ‘change for better’,
which when used in the business sense and applied to the workplace, is an extremely efficient way to quickly improve a process in an organisation.
One of the examples that the book refers to is about a US firm who regularly hold ‘Improvement Events’ where people are invited with specifically different disciplines, from the CEO to assembly line workers to meet each day for a week and collectively unpick a process they feel could be better. Throughout the week they use each person’s expertise to dissect, test and retest a process before putting it back together to take out to the workforce.
The results are improved efficiency, significant impact on bottom line performance and greater employee engagement.
Every organisation or individual I work with or meet is continuously looking to improve either their business or themselves. Sometimes it’s labeled as ‘change’, which, as I wrote about last week, can often have the opposite affect of improvement, as a result of how our ‘subconscious’ brain reacts, triggering either a threat or reward response.
Creating a ‘Kaizen’ culture in an organisation, is a much healthier way of creating a more agile business that employees feel they have been the co-creators or facilitators of.
If you are looking to make improvements in your business in 2016, could ‘Kaizen’ help you to facilitate greater and more tangible outcomes?