Kaizen means change for the better, and describes improvement made continuously and in small increments by the people doing the work — as distinct from improvement delivered periodically as a project by specialists.
Small changes are testable, cheap to reverse, and do not need approval cycles that outlast the interest in making them. An organisation making a hundred minor improvements a year generally ends up ahead of one running two large projects, and accumulates the capability to keep going. No individual Kaizen is impressive; the aggregate over years is.
The hard part is who does it. Kaizen requires giving operators real latitude to change how they work, including the latitude to occasionally be wrong. Where improvement must be authorised upward, the approval cycle costs more than most small changes are worth and the practice dies quietly.
Kaizen events — focused three-to-five-day workshops on one process — are useful for breaking through something daily improvement has not shifted. They are not what the word means, and an organisation that only improves during events does not have a Kaizen culture.
Suggestion schemes fail the same way: ideas submitted into a system that responds slowly stop being submitted, and the failure becomes evidence that nobody wanted to improve anything.
