To learn how to use kaizen, form small teams and run experiments.
Learn more about Kaizen and the Toyota Production System here
If you want to learn how to use with kaizen in a company which doesn’t support it, start by forming small teams with like-minded people to run short and quick kaizen experiments. It will give you hands on experience and the confidence to use it more broadly, as well as understand how to adapt it to your organisation’s realities.
In addition to being easier to spin an initiative up, small, tightly knit teams have a higher chance of running successful kaizen projects. It is easier to align a small team of kaizen practitioners with the same goal to fix problems, compared to a larger team with conflicting agendas.
A key success factor for kaizen are people with open minds. Kaizen is a contradiction of human nature, as it looks to see what doesn’t work well so we can improve it. To be successful, people must be willing to look and question every part of a process. Nothing should be holy ground, and those who are wedded to how things have always been done may be a hinderance to your goals.
Once you run kaizen projects with your teams a few times, it will give you the confidence to do more and scale up, all in a short period of time.
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