Creating a Kaizen Culture
Jon Miller, Mike Wroblewski, Jaime Villafuerte
Many organizations profess to be continuous improvement organizations. This book addresses the characteristics of a truly continuous improvement culture; one that does not just use some tools associated with Lean or Six Sigma efforts, but uses the mindset at every level of the organization. The term kaizen is adapted from the Japanese term for “change for the better”. Many people go further as assert that kaizen implies a progression of changes for the better (continuous improvement).
In laying the foundations for the central concepts of the book, the authors provide a number of interesting facts that illustrate some of the misunderstandings about kaizen.
- While many Japanese terms are now associated with the practices of continuous improvement and total quality, the foundation was provided by America experts in the post-war era. The US government brought these experts to Japan to help rebuild the Japanese industrial base and some Japanese companies adopted it whole heartedly. Offered at the same time to American companies, the methods were ignored until the late 1970s and early 1980s.
- There is nothing inherently Japanese about continuous improvement. Attempts to introduce kaizen culture into Japanese companies fail at about the same rate as they do in the west. Few Japanese companies have full-fledged continuous improvement cultures. We hear a lot about Toyota in this regard, but they are special in many ways.
- In the west, kaizen is associated with events; typically a 5-day problem solving workshop. This is rare in Japan, where kaizen is more commonly an emphasis on everybody improving their processes and products every day.
The goal of this book is to convince people that developing a kaizen culture is much more powerful than just learning and using kaizen tools; in fact, the book does not discuss kaizen tools. While culture change requires more effort to achieve, the results are more sustainable. In fact, it might be better to have the culture, and no tools, than the tools alone. Toyota’s approach to continuous improvement is itself a product of continuous improvement. It was developed through a long process of experimentation, incremental improvements, sharing of experiences and developing people through application of the process and concepts.
Culture consists of a mix of visible and invisible elements. The core beliefs and behaviors are the sometimes invisible residue of past successes and failures that support both change and resistance to development of a continuous improvement culture. Most organizations are not built around incentives for leaders to question their decisions and actions that appear to be responsible for success. Yet this is what a kaizen culture requires.* Continuous improvement culture involves everyone, at every level of the company, challenging the effectiveness of established processes with a goal of changing them for the better. One of the recurring themes of this book is that true kaizen culture is built on developing people. Continuous improvement cultures are in constant motion and this requires employees that simultaneously feel secure and dissatisfied with the status quo. One reading of the continuous improvement philosophy can be that the intent is more to build better people than better processes and products. Better people focused on the customer will create better processes and products.
The book makes a number of observations about culture and culture change.
One feature of culture is the importance of context in communication. Low-context cultures assume that listeners do not know much, so more explicit information and direction must be provided. High-context cultures assume that people have a common understanding so require general information and can “fill in the meaning” themselves. For example, Japan has a higher context culture than the United States so communication is often more abstract. Within the US, culture in the Southeast is higher context than the upper Midwest. Companies differ in their context. Words have more power in high-context cultures because there are fewer of them. The connection between behaviors and core assumptions may be more difficult to understand in high-context cultures.
Most business cultures are results-oriented. This promotes a solution focus and not a problem focus. Developing a kaizen culture requires more attention to problems. A problem poorly stated is virtually unsolvable. The deep examination of problems, through investigation by direct observation, the building of consensus on the nature of the problem, and analyzing root causes through scientific investigation are not part of human nature.
Most businesses display their success but not their problems. One Medtronic plant had a wall in the plant that was covered by the problems that they were working on. When asked about this, they responded that they are problem solvers and problem preventers and this was what they were paying attention to. They commented that if they kept it on a spreadsheet nobody would pay any attention to it.
Kaizen cultures believe in urgency. In the kaizen context urgency means paying immediate attention. The further understanding of immediate is intense attention. The meaning of urgent in this context urgency is not associated with stressful as much as focused.
The book emphasizes a method of consensus building called Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle, with the greatest emphasis placed on planning. Numerous asides indicated that plans are not something to be set in stone, but analyses and intentions. Within the PDCA, 8 sub-steps are described. This process demonstrates the primacy of problem description compared to problem solving.
- Plan consists of: (1) clarify the problem (2) break down the problem (3) set the target to achieve (4) analyze root causes (5) develop counter-measures
- Do consists of: (6) see counter-measures through
- Check consists of (7) check process and results
- Act consists of: (8) standardize success, learn from failures and identify gaps for next plan
Decision making is a cultural characteristic. In most business organizations, decisions are made based on hierarchal position and advocacy power. In contrast, kaizen culture uses the results from small experiments to decide how to act. Edgar Schein characterized the 6 ways that organizations can make a decision, which might be framed as the true answer to the question – what should we do?
- Some decisions are based on dogma. “The way we have always done it” is an example.
- Authority is the basis when someone says “The boss decided…”
- Socially-determined decisions are the result of group decisions; for example, a majority decided…
- Debates can be used to test a decision in a conflict survival approach. Judges in a legal situation test arguments about legal matters, with the “best” argument winning.
- When the decision is based on objective facts, pragmatic methods are at work. What works matters!
- Scientific takes pragmatic one step further by imposing the requirement that the result be according to the scientific method – meaning a properly designed experiment and a validated method of analysis.
In one sense, these are listed from least to most “valid” with the understanding that the question is not one of “values” but “procedure”. Every organization displays all six types of approaches with most organizations having s preferred few approaches dominating. The authors suggest that a kaizen culture displays a seven kind of decision making – adaptive. Adaptive is characterized by choosing one of the other six methods consciously with respect to matching the decision approach to the kind of question. Some questions require authority-based decisions but others require scientific-based decisions. An adaptive organization understands this applies the best approach. Toyota embodies an adaptive approach in their 5-step decision making process. (1) Find out what going on. (2) understand the root causes by asking why repeatedly (5 times). (3) Consider a wide range of alternative solutions with a detailed justification of the preferred alternative. (4) Develop a consensus on the right choice, where the consensus may involve third parties. (5) Insure clear and concise communication throughout the process.
One of the basics of brainstorming is “get lots of ideas”. This is often viewed as a method of driving a wide range of ideas to address the problem. Similarly, continuous improvement efforts often ask for employee ideas and seek lots of ideas. An alternative perspective is that collecting ideas drives a better understanding of the problem. A Chrysler executive described a conversation with a Japanese consultant. He corrected me, saying the real reason you want to drive a high volume of suggestions is that otherwise, you never ask your hourly workforce to put together a logical description of a problem or use a logical process to solve a problem. In other words, the process of making a formal suggestion is a learning opportunity because people begin to think about their work differently – as something that can be improved.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is attributed to Peter Drucker expresses the power of culture to defeat or sustain management initiatives. The book advances the perspective that (good) strategy is actually more of a continuous improvement effort than an “event”. It involves small experiments to test hypotheses developed as a result of direct observation close to the market. Quoting Helmuth von Moltke, strategy is a system of expedients; “It is the translation of knowledge to practical life, the improvement of the original leading thought in accordance with continually changing situations.” The link between culture and this view of strategy is based on co-evolution. People can’t adapt to sudden changes of direction and their collective rejection of the change “eats strategy”. Evolutionary strategy permits people and organization to learn and change together. One of the goals of kaizen culture is development of adaptive people, able to learn and change. Just what a system of expedients needs.
An important aspect of continuous improvement culture is the role of individual employees in improving their own immediate work processes. The book discusses daily kaizen – the practice of every person making one improvement every day. Such improvements are necessarily small, but they are made by people who are most expert in the actual work as experiments that can be measured against a set of standards. They specifically discussed a small company called FastCap which has an all-hands meeting every morning. All 56 (including the CEO) meet for 30-60 minutes to review the previous day’s mistakes and problem solve together. A different employee leads each day’s meeting. No doubt many readers will remain in shock and dismiss…the possibility of having the entire production team meet…for learning and improvement. Yet how many hours each day to people in your organization spend in meetings in which zero learning and zero improvement happen? How far from the actual workplace to these meetings take place? How fresh or accurate is the information being discussed at these meetings? Daily kaizen can be expressed as a set of principles; some of which include:
- Integrate improvement into everyday work
- Focus scope of ideas on small. Local changes that the natural team can make.
- Give direction to improvement ideas by addressing gaps in performance targets.
- Make improving one’s work part of everyone’s job.
Though a goal of kaizen culture is having people who adapt well to change, the reality is that people are people and “well” is a relative concept. Some change will always trigger big reactions. The book describes Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ change curve: denial, anger, bargaining, despair, and acceptance. The kaizen approach of engaging people in the direct experience of guiding the change can help people move more rapidly to acceptance. But what may be most important about this is that leaders demonstrate their respect for people by listening to people and acting on their ideas, by treating people as individuals with individual styles, and maintaining a safe environment for experimentation, failure and learning.
One of the reasons for seeking a continuous improvement culture is that a positive reinforcement cycle is expected to take hold. Small improvements should make further improvements easier to make. Though a simple 2-step cycle of (1) make the problems visible, and (2) solve the problems, it can be a real challenge to make the problems visible. This is one area where the availability of good performance information can be valuable in making problems visible. The context of the book is primarily manufacturing, so metrics related to throughput, rework, materials cost and lost time may be available. In many other domains of an organization, there may not be good information of “productivity” against which to measure. This is a challenge to progress and perhaps the first goal of continuous improvement – measuring what is currently true. Toyota has a saying, “No problem is a problem,” and this means that when we can’t see our problems, this is a problem because they are still there, and we are not aware of them. Many problems and issues will surface as a result of connecting processes and people in a flow…
Most companies benefit from continuous improvement, but the real benefits may arise when the entire organization is dedicated to improvement. This then becomes the cultural element. The book is relatively clear that culture can’t be imposed on an existing organization, but an organizations culture can evolve. Implementing continuous improvement methods and philosophies will change the culture, and leaders can help that transition be smoother and quicker by paying attention to people, developing their skills using continuous improvement itself. The benefit of this approach will be performance improvement AND employees more able to adapt to and lead change.
Comment and interpretation:
- An interesting feature of this book is that it happens to be about culture in the context of continuous improvement – Toyota style. In many respects, it could apply equally to innovation which would seem to be nearly the opposite of the control and standardization that continuous process improvement often seems to imply. The authors mention in passing that the first step in innovation and continuous improvement is to understand what is valued by the customer and the gap from the current offering to that. Both should have some objective understanding of how to measure success. Both require good observation skills, creativity, a willingness to take some risk, and perseverance to act in the face of difficulty.
- The parallel between continuous improvement and innovation has another element – both are about change. Continuous improvement driven changes many small things that combine into a big change. Innovation may involve big changes in how the company serves their customers. Whether slow or fast, both require people to change the way they think and behave – not just what they “do”. By itself, this may be stressful. But it is additionally stressful for leaders who may have attained their positions by their skills in the established way of doing things. Now they must help challenge their own basis for success.
- Continuous change is subversive, and possibly more subversive than innovation. In a continuous change culture, front line employees identify opportunities for improvement and take action. They are expected to understand their work and its impact on the production system. They are trusted to test their ideas, within a framework, without seeking formal approval. In some versions of this system, apparently the employee is asked to make an improvement every day – clearly offering no time for substantial management review and clearly indicating the small nature of the individual improvements deployed. But the cumulative effect is what matters. The effect on production efficiency or quality can be profound, but the transfer of power from managers to employees to make these decisions is also profound.
- The phenomena of cultural context might be a partial explanation for cross-functional friction. Within a discipline, there is probably a cultural context based on norms that fit the discipline, and these norms might not be apparent to an outsider. Operations and R&D people might both be “technical”, but they exist in different cultures. Both have more in common than they do with some other disciplines, like sales or human resources. Perhaps this explains why organizational change efforts often founder; they fail to account for the differing cultural assumptions present in functions while assuming that the cultural assumptions and context of senior managers are ubiquitous.
*text in italics is directly quoted from the book.
Recent Comments