Six Ways to Ensure that Kaizen Events Build a Culture of Excellence

Kaizen events can be central to building and maintaining a culture of excellence.

Kaizen events provide an efficient and flexible framework for leveraging employee knowledge and creativity to tackle intransigent problems, especially those that cross department and organizational boundaries, and building a culture of excellence.

There has been a lot of talk lately in lean circles about cultural transformation. The thinking and conversation goes something like, “Yes, all of these improvement projects are nice, and the results are great, but if you really want to transform the performance of your organization, you have to build a culture of improvement. That means changing how people think and solve problems every day.” We couldn’t agree more. Not only do you have to change how people think, you have to change how they feel. 

Yet, in the same breath, the classic three- to five-day, cross-functional kaizen event is often derided as “lean lite” or “drive-by kaizen” for companies that aren’t able to make a full commitment to culture change. That point of view couldn’t be more wrong. Kaizen events can be central to building and maintaining a culture of excellence. This is especially true when time is limited and major changes have to be implemented quickly.

Kaizen events provide an efficient and flexible framework for leveraging employee knowledge and creativity to tackle intransigent problems, especially those that cross developmental and organizational boundaries.  They also create a crucible for effectively managing the emotions–the “heart” of change–that surrounds any improvement effort.

6 tips for optimizing the impact of your kaizen events while creating a culture of excellence:

1. Strategic alignment. Utilize strategy deployment (also known as policy deployment and hoshin kanri) to prioritize improvement activities (including kaizen events) based on near- and long-term business objectives.

2. Widespread participation from across the organization. The first day of an event typically includes some basic training on lean concepts and tools, which the team immediately applies to the targeted problem. The more people who participate in events, the deeper the organization’s knowledge and skill set becomes.

3. Emphasize the universality of the tools. Whether it is 5S principles, value-stream mapping or creating an A3, event leaders and managers should understand and emphasize how the tools and problem-solving methods can and should be used every day.

4. Skillful leadership. Choose event leaders with extreme care. It’s impossible to overemphasize how important the leader is to an event’s success. Even highly skilled and experienced kaizen leaders can be a bad fit for a particular team or the culture of organization.

5. Do the homework. Failure to fully implement an improvement plan does more than fail to achieve the targeted results. It fails to respect the effort the team put into analyzing the current state, identifying root causes and developing a solution (which could be the definition of building a culture of improvement). Whether it’s the CI staff or a department manager, homework tasks must be assigned and followed up on.

6. Daily reinforcement. Daily management reviews—a core element of a lean management system—reinforce the changes made and planned during kaizen events, and prevents back sliding.

Major change in any organization creates a whirlwind of disruption that raises employee anxiety, sometimes to dysfunctional levels. When skillfully managed, kaizen events can replace the anxiety around change with positive energy, individual ownership and excitement that is essential for sustaining progress. Getting everyone’s heart in the correct state is essential for sustaining progress and creating a true culture of excellence.