Kaizen

Lately I've been mindful of Kaizen, the Japanese concept of continual, incremental improvement. The first step with Kaizen both at work and at home is awareness: clearly seeing the possibilities for improvement.

Since improvement is incremental with small measured experiments to check progress, the concept of Kaizen can overcome that sinking feeling that "this mess is way too big to tackle." It does require a degree of trust, optimism, and faith in oneself and other people, however, since very often an improvement can't be made without some agreement and cooperation from the larger group. Open, frequent communication is essential to Kaizen.

I had a conversation with a colleague who was new to one of our teams at work yesterday. I was (from my perspective, of course) attempting to communicate the benefits of working well across teams, explaining the history behind why this federated group of teams had joined together for common goals, how important it was to maintain respect and collaboration across these teams. "I want you to be successful on this team," I said at one point as I was trying to convince her to be more mindful of how her actions were impacting the group as a whole. "I'm already successful," she snapped back. Just one time in my life I would like to feel that kind of certitude, but I don't think it would help me for the long haul. To understand why, keep reading.

How can you be successful without considering the team as a whole? Kaizen assumes that the group works together to identify ways to improve quality and efficiency, and then incrementally implements these steps, testing progress at each step. It doesn't work well for those who don't want to acknowledge mutual dependencies.

I was heartened the other day during a team retrospective meeting to hear a respected and brilliant software architect comment that very early team communication about how a task will be accomplished can help guide it the right way from the beginning and can therefore reduce waste of time and resource. But this takes time up front, and some patience, and the natural urge to proactively communicate. Not everybody is born able to do this. It has to be encouraged and developed.

My dentist (of all people) has a saying his staff quotes during lectures about proper dental hygiene: "The trouble with communication is that people think it's happened."

True everywhere in life. If you think you know what's going on already, and if you're absolutely positive you're on the right track, you don't bother to ask, and you jump straight to a solution that may have little to do with addressing the root cause of a problem. I've done this so many times I've lost count. But at least I'm mindful of the trap.

My Kaizen thought for the day: ask five whys to understand a difficult problem, and always question what you think you already know.


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