How Kaizen Conflict Breeds Creativity and Teamwork

When skillfully managed, the conflict in a kaizen event can improve teamwork by unleashing a slew of creative ideas and potential solutions.

For the uninitiated, kaizen events are a team-based approach to finding and implementing solutions to lingering and endemic issues that have often resisted prior efforts to resolve them. They typically start with a cross-functional team who get together over three to five days, starting with some introductory training and concluding with the implementation of solutions and a report out on the results. Follow-up work and monitoring ensure that the changes are sustained. The exact approach, length and agenda tend to evolve as the understanding of the mindset and tools deepen within an organization.

Two points during a kaizen event when respectful conflict can be productive.

The first is when the newly formed team is just getting to know one another, when they’re wondering about their purpose, and starting to look at the process they’ve been pulled together to address. This is the “storming” phase of the well-known “forming, storming, norming, and performing” path that teams follow on their way to high performance which was first described in a 1965 article by psychologist Bruce Tuckman.

During this phase, a good facilitator will draw out any points of conflict. The team will look at current performance and document all of the points of failure. We call this “making it ugly.” Having a diverse group of people from inside the targeted process, people who support the process in some way, and people completely outside of it, helps encourage a fresh perspective on the way things are currently done, revealing even more wasteful activities and movement. This exercise can get emotional when fingers start pointing—it almost always gets emotional, in fact—which is why the focus always has to be kept on the process failures, and away from any specific individuals. Ironically, the most cordial and conflict averse organizations tend to be the most divided by functional silos.

When a cross-functional team is assembled to tackle interdepartmental issues, the wasteful and disconnected processes that this type of culture allows to proliferate can be striking. This step can also feel overwhelming once the sheer quantity of issues have all been documented in one place, usually for the first time ever. But like a doctor pinpointing the cause of an illness, the more information that’s available, the more accurate the diagnosis and more effective the course of treatment is likely to be. The second time when conflict can be productive is during root cause analysis and the search for solutions.

Contrary to the most popular brainstorming methodology and its “no-judgments approach” to generating ideas—which was invented by an advertising exec in the 1940’s—a New Yorker research has demonstrated the benefits of critical thinking and an open discussion in eliciting the highest quality ideas. Again, the cross-functional structure of an effective kaizen team, comprised of people from a variety of backgrounds, supports a rigorous debate and the discovery of optimal solutions.

All of this is why seasoned kaizen event leaders learn to embrace the “storming” phase rather than avoid it. This phase is more than something teams have to get through on their way to high performance. When done respectfully, focusing on the process and not individuals, conflict and disagreement can be highly creative and beneficial to finding the most effective solutions.