A better way for businesses to apply Kaizen for individuals
Kaizen is a Japanese word that stands for a “continuous incremental improvement”. Kaizen is core to the organizational concept of “Lean”. Japanese manufacturing companies such as Toyota pioneered the “Lean” methodology in the 80s. The big idea behind it is to create a culture of continuous improvement where all employees are actively engaged in improving the company.
The goal of “Lean” manufacturing was to increase quality and to focus the company’s efforts and resources on creating value for its end users. Because it stemmed from industrial engineering, the original version “Lean” focused heavily on processes. This improvement of processes directly and positively impacted the quality and reliability of the end products.
“Kaizen focuses on continuous incremental improvement, and Lean focuses on reducing waste and increasing value.”
Today, the original “Lean” methodology have evolved beyond manufacturing. Thanks to entrepreneurs pioneers such as Steve Blank and Eric Ries, these principles are core to the “Lean Startup” methodology that aims to mitigate risk when starting, building and scaling new companies.
The concept of Kaizen is also found as a fundamental piece of Agile Development. Some schools implement very fast feedback loops through pair programming, unit tests, and continuous integration, whereas other schools implement longer ones through daily Scrums or (bi)weekly Sprints.
“Companies = Product + Processes + People.”
Businesses can be reduced to a combination of products, processes, and people. In the current competitive landscape, most would agree that the most valuable of these three is people. Ironically, the discipline around applying Kaizen is very well defined when it comes down to products (agile development, customer-centric design) and processes (Kanban, Scrum sprints, Build/Test/Learn iteration cycles), but much less so when it comes down to people.
People are the most valuable asset to a company’s success. Nevertheless, making sure that people continuously improve is either an afterthought or addressed in an unfortunate manner. How many of you have ever learned anything meaningful to improve your skill sets during your performance appraisal? On one hand, new forms of performance reviews that include 360 reviews do a better job at providing actionable insights, but the low-frequency companies run these reviews remain a major hurdle.
On the other hand, Kaizen is a proven methodology for continuously improving product and process and generating value. So, why applying Kaizen to people isn’t widely recognized and used yet? I believe the core reason is simple: people are the most intricate part of an organization. So it’s no surprise that lots of frameworks have been developed, experimented with, and implemented to achieve continuous improvement for processes and products, but very few targetting at people.
How we tackled designing Kaizen for individuals?
As we’ve learned above, one of the best ways to implement the concept Kaizen is to do it through feedback loops. Most of us are familiar with the exercise of providing “feedback” to people. However, we recognized that it is a complex task since it involves people feelings, interpersonal communication, cognitive biases, and differences of perception.
Let’s start by applying the first core concept of Kaizen: continuity. Individuals should have the opportunity to improve on a continuous basis. Therefore, our solution should be highly flexible and opportunity-based (i.e. there is something to improve, and the individual can grab the opportunity to do it right away), rather than time-based (every week, month, quarter, semester, I reflect on what I should have improved).
Feedback should be timely.
Second, let’s look at the second core concept of Kaizen: incrementation. The notion of acting on the improvement opportunity as it arises is core to Kaizen. Therefore, the scope of the feedback should be narrow enough for people to act immediately on it.
Feedback should be specific.
Third, you need to know what to improve before even trying to start working on it. It means one may need some external help and perspective. Relying on the aid of others to tell you what to improve and how to improve is the common practice of “feedback”.
Feedback should be relevant.
Fourth, it should be realistic. Kaizen is centered around improving with the goal to generate meaningful value. One should have the means to implement the recommendations provided.
Feedback should be actionable.
Fifth, it should be well communicated. This part is not unique to Kaizen. It stems from the nature of a process that heavily relies on information transmitted from one person to another. The feedback process is intrinsically sensitive to this.
Feedback should be structured.
“Kaizen for people is feedback that is timely, relevant, specific, actionable and structured.”
Our solution to provide Kaizen to individuals and teams
We built Captain Feedback with these five principles in mind. We added a sixth one that was dear to our heart: it has to be fun and easy. That is why we chose Captain Feedback to live in Slack as a fun bot you can ping anytime you want to. (ok, it is also because we love Slack)
“it also has to be fun and easy.”
The world today knows and have witnessed the benefits of adopting agile, lean, and Kaizen for products and processes to increase value, mitigate risks and shape successful companies. It is time to apply these same principles to your team and team members.
Sign up for Captain Feedback and see it for yourself!
PS: Captain Feedback is still a young product. We see it as an on-going experiment and we’d love your feedback on how we could improve. Thanks!
