A Post-War Concept to Help the Post-Pandemic Crisis
How a Japanese word can inspire us to start over again
During these days of isolation, I meet again with a beautiful Japanese word. I couldn’t be more appropriate for the current times.
I have been thinking, like most of us, in what are we going to do after this crisis. I have been thinking about the economical side of the crisis rather than the pandemic one. And not just what are we going to do but how. Not because the pandemic isn’t enough important, but we can’t put aside the economic aftermath and wait to see what happens.
An old term
I don’t remember the moment I recently arrived at the article at Wikipedia for the concept of kaizen. You may have heard about the concept of kaizen applied to business and manufacture.
When I was a child, one of my uncles had a book with that word in the title, next to books about zero defects and Lee Iacocca. It was trendy in the seventies.
Later, I read about kaizen when I was studying manufacturing processes and methods. It sounded good but not for software development. And even if you consider it for other processes, it requires an exceptionally long way to implement and a mentality.
