- 10 Common Misconceptions About Lean Manufacturing
- Ten Reasons Why One Piece Flow Will Not Work
- The Best Visual Control in the World
- Give Me 60 Minutes and I'll Give You a Lean Transformation
- Toyota Owes Grandpa Ford
- Look Up from Your Work and Ask: ;Could We Flow This?
- Ouch! Change Hurts
- E-mail 5S
- The Top 5 Reasons for Using Production Preparation Process (3P)
- You've Gotta Go to Gemba More Often Than That!
- 5S Your Desk: And Other Tips for Office Productivity
- Skill Matrix Enables Suggestion System
- Work Content for Line Leads
- Strong Supervision: The Key to Long-term Kaizen
- The Four Elements for Sustaining Kaizen
- Keys to Sustaining 5S
- Top 10 Improvement Tools Named After Lean Sensei
- Intuition, Information and the Toyota Production System
- Nine Rules for Fighting Endless Meetings
How Many Ways Can You Do Kaizen at Your Company?The theme of kaizen and the human brain is one of our favorites here at Gemba, and this week's post by Mike Lopez at the Lean blog takes on the important topic of Psychology & Lean. Mike points out that the way in which you do kaizen shouldn't be a barrier to people with certain personalities. Specifically, Mike argues for ways to make it easier for introverts to lead kaizen events, without being exhausted by the amount of time they have to spend with people during and around kaizen events. He makes some good points and offers remedies. Yet the fundamental premise in his situation seems to be that kaizen = kaizen events. This is too often true in many companies. There is really no good reason for having kaizen events be the main or the only way to do kaizen. How many ways can you do kaizen at your company? This is a question I am asking more and more often these days. For too many trekkers on the Lean journey, kaizen is synonymous with kaizen events, the full-blown five-day affairs with training on the front end and a celebration on the back end. Or for Japanese-owned companies it may be a more of a rough-and-tumble gemba kaizen which is pared down to getting the improvements made in a few days. These can be team-based, but expert-driven, potentially creating barriers to total involvement. Everyone should have at least one way to do kaizen on any given day. Perhaps the suggestion box is the primary way kaizen is done in your organization, and if certain stumbling blocks are avoided, this can be a great way to have total involvement in kaizen. QC Circle activities are another good way for people to work on kaizen activities in small teams over longer periods of time than during a kaizen event. Managers and senior leaders can lead problem solving through jishuken initiatives or by managing through A3 reports. And the list continues to about 10 distinct ways a person can do kaizen, everyday. It's worth repeating, with emphasis: Everyone. Should have. At least. One way. To do. Kaizen. Everyday. How many ways can you do kaizen at your company? By Jon Miller - June 21, 2007 2:15 PM 
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Comments
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Hi John 5S Suggestion Scheme Good Spot TPM Kaizen (Gemba Kaizen) Benchmarking Kaizen Tour Kaizen Forest Kaizen Rally Kaizen Conference I managed to think of those 10 fairly quickly I’m sure there are more but you mentioned 10 so I’ll stop now. Good list Chris! There's a good mix here of steady, daily kaizen and longer-cycle events and competitions to give kaizen a periodic boost. |
