1% Better Every Day (part 3/6)

This might be the boring bit, but sometimes the stuff in the middle is worth understanding. don’t rush the process.

Kaizen in its Original Context:
Business

Kazien is a term that has very much been adopted by the self-improvement crowd and that is popular among everyone who hopes to become happier, fitter, wealthier, and wiser. But it began as a business term, and understanding its routes in this way can go a long way to helping us grasp the concept and better apply it to our own lives.

And if you happen to run a business, then of course you’ll find all of this useful for its own merits.

The Origin of Kaizen
The word kaizen means “improvement” or “change for the better” in Japanese. However, the term is used more specifically to refer to continuous improvement or small changes. The term Kaizen first adopted this meaning in the world of business. This was especially pertaining to the methodologies of car manufacturer Toyota, initially. The strategy has been successfully adapted to business for many organizations, and later to the self-improvement field. The book Toyota Way explains the use of Kaizen in detail and has canonized its usage to some extent.

That said, the self-improvement crowd has also somewhat applied a little artistic license to the way it uses kaizen. In many ways, self-help books tend to oversimplify Kaizen, while others misinterpret some of the core concepts.
Kaizen is all amount focussing on the minutiae. On making small changes that add up to big differences. But whereas many self-help books tell you that this translates to “flossing your teeth” a little every day to ingrain new habits, that isn’t actually anything to do with the original meaning of the word.
That isn’t to say that this advice doesn’t have merit.

We will be discussing all types of kaizen in this blog, but by addressing the strictest business interpretation first, we’ll also understand the “official” version – which just so happens to also be extremely powerful and often overlooked.

Types of Kaizen
In business, in its original context, Kaizen has been generally broken down into two separate terms:
• Flow kaizen
• Process kaizen

flow kaizen, the approach looks at a “value stream.” This might be a whole workflow, in which the organization can look for different opportunities to improve the process., imagine a large production line that involves several stages.
While making a tiny change at each step of the way won’t seem to have a big impact on its own, when taken as a whole, all those tiny improvements can potentially have a huge result.

Process kaizen on the other hand is the “concentrated improvement of a single process.” That means looking at one step and making constant small improvements to get it to the point where it is the best it can be.

Kaizen is often described as being “bottom-up,” meaning that you start by looking at the most fundamental levels and making small changes there. You can potentially improve every aspect of your business by cleaning the floors.

Why?

Because cleaner floors mean fewer accidents and happier staff. That leads to more efficient storage and retrieval. That leads to more funds left over, and happier customers. That leads to more morale and more R&D. The result is better products and a better brand image.

Simplify and Eliminate Waste

Moreover, Kaizen is also about looking to eliminate waste. In any given process, there is almost always “waste” that can be eliminated. By getting rid of these errors, you can significantly increase the speed of a process. This can have huge and transformational changes for a business.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you are someone who writes articles for a big blog and uploads them to WordPress every day (WordPress being an online publishing platform). When you upload the article, you need to add images and formatting like bolding and headers, etc.

So your current workflow looks like this:
• You write your article
• You read through your work and check for typos
• You upload the article to WordPress
• You read through your work and upload images and add formatting

What’s wrong with this?

Well, nothing on the face of it, except that by taking this approach, you’re not working in the most efficient way possible. That’s because you’re currently reading through everything you wrote twice. That’s once to make sure that it is spelled correctly and once to add images.
So why not:

• Write the article

• Upload it to WordPress

• Read through it and fix typos while formatting
  

This has effectively combined two steps into one step that will take slightly longer than either on its own but will be much quicker than doing both. And that, in turn, can potentially save you a large amount of time and effort in the long run. Let’s say this saves you 10 minutes per article, and that you upload 10 articles per day. That’s 100 minutes back and perhaps this now means you can afford to upload an additional article? If so, you might now be able to earn an extra €30 a day.
As a sole trader, you might use Kaizen therefore to earn an extra €30 every single day without increasing your rates, working harder, or otherwise changing anything about your business!
And kaizen is always relentless. Because there’s still probably waste here. What if you could remove the time spent uploading by writing directly into WordPress? And what if you batched all of your proofing and formatting together? Could that save you more time?

Kaizen is constantly looking for waste like this and opportunities to streamline and improve flows and processes.

While this system was originally designed for manufacturing once again, it can work just as well in any other type of business OR many aspects of your personal life.

Hopefully, already you are relating some of this to your personal life, and how you can break down some of the processes in your day to eliminate wasted time to make tiny tweaks, that on their own seem insignificant (and require minimum effort) but over the course of your day add up to actually make a big difference:

you might tweak your breakfast time, or indeed what you are eating - which stops you feeling hungry and reaching for sugary snacks, or you might tweak how you do your shopping, you might set aside some time to prepare healthy snacks in advance, you might stop what you are doing every 3/4 hours and have a meal or healthy snack - which keeps your body in balance, and stops cravings - that in itself does not seem too much effort, but over a 14 day period just that change could make a massive difference. Likewise - you might just say you are going to take a 10-minute walk with your lunch break, again not a big deal in the process of your day - but that could be just the start, keep thinking.

The Opposite of Kaizen: Kaikaku

While Kaizen can be immensely powerful when applied correctly, it also isn’t the right fit for every situation. Every now and then, a process or a flow is beyond salvation. This is when a situation calls for Kaikaku, or drastic change.
As you might have guessed, this means throwing the old process out of the window and starting all over again. You will find that massive change like this often meets with great psychological resistance. But it’s important that you only stick to a process or flow for the right reasons: and that does not include nostalgia or sentimentality!
In other words, if you’ve been working on a website for the last 5 years and it simply isn’t gaining any traction, then you might need to completely rethink your strategy, or you might even need to scrap the website and start again.
The longer you keep a failed project going, the more energy, money, and resources you will sink with it. One of the key aspects of successful kaizen is knowing the difference: when it’s time for kaikaku and when it’s time for kaizen.

Apply this to your personal life

It’s time for kaikaku - if in terms of nutrition you are looking to change diet, be healthier perhaps lose weight get fitter if you have been on every diet known to man & his dog, or every weight management system/group without achieving long term success - then its time for Kaikaku, or drastic change. Recognise that, find a different process (of course I will always recommend a real food diet & an individual understanding of your body needs), and incorporate the principle of Kaizen.

The same principle for exercise, if you are doing the same thing over & over again without success - kaikaku

Thank you for reading - please follow the blog to start looking at how to apply the 1% Better Every Day to your life.