Kaizen

Kaizen is the Japanese word for “continuous improvement.”

In management, it is the idea that all employees, from the CEO to the line worker, seek to improve any process they are involved with.

Kaizen is not only a tool for innovation or quality assurance. Most importantly, it is a tool to avoid zombification. A team who doesn’t seek improvement decays. Its skills wither. Its engagement becomes complacence. Its processes, obsolete.

Kaizen is not only about the advantages of doing it, but about the disadvantages of not doing it.

I talk more in detail about setting expectations in my “Best Practices For Operational Excellence” and in my “Teams Are Adaptive Systems”.