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Continuous Improvement in Action: Kaizen, Reengineering, and the Quality Movement
Principles of Management · Chapter 5: Modern Management PerspectivesSection 5.6 · lesson 24 of 11713 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Kaizen, reengineering and the quality movement.
- Place kaizen and reengineering in the quality movement
- Describe kaizen's assumptions, mechanisms and cycle
- Contrast reengineering with incremental change
- Choose an approach from an honest diagnosis
Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (1,742 words). Read along, or search it.
Modern Management Perspectives
Continuous Improvement in Action
When a process isn't working well, a manager faces a basic choice. Improve it a little at a time, or tear it up and start again. This section closes the chapter with the two classic answers to that choice. Kaizen is the philosophy of small, continuous improvement, driven by the people doing the work. Business process reengineering is the opposite bet. Radical redesign, for dramatic gains. We place both in the quality movement they grew out of. We look at how kaizen works, and at what reengineering promised, and actually delivered. And we finish with the practical skill. Choosing between them from an honest diagnosis of the process.
Historical Context
The Quality Movement
Both approaches have a common background in the quality movement. That movement developed in the decades following the Second World War. Quality thinking moved out of its place as a specialized technical concern. It became an increasingly central part of manufacturing practice. By the later twentieth century, quality was a genuine competitive force. Organizations were sharply distinguished from one another on reliability, and on defect rates. This section treats the movement only as historical context, and that's deliberate. Its full principles, its pioneering figures, and how it's implemented are covered later. They appear in Subchapter fifteen point two, under the name Total Quality Management. What this section covers instead are two specific approaches that grew out of the movement. Those are kaizen, and business process reengineering.
Kaizen
Small Improvements, From the People Doing the Work
Kaizen is the philosophy of making small, continuous improvements to a process. Crucially, those improvements are driven by the people actually doing the work. They are not imposed from above by specialists, or by management. The philosophy rests on three assumptions worth stating explicitly. First, frontline workers see problems that management does not. The person performing a task every day notices friction, waste, and awkwardness. A manager who reviews the process only occasionally will typically miss those entirely. Second, many small improvements compound. No single suggestion needs to be dramatic on its own. A steady stream of them accumulates into substantial gains. Third, improvement capability is itself built through practice. The skill of noticing and proposing improvements grows the more it is exercised. So when an organization regularly asks people to improve their own processes, it gets a workforce that keeps getting better at it.
Kaizen's Mechanisms
How Kaizen Actually Runs
Kaizen runs through several specific mechanisms. Suggestion systems give workers a formal, low-friction channel for proposing improvement ideas. Improvement circles are small groups of workers who meet regularly, to identify and solve problems in their own area of work. Standard work is the documented, currently agreed best method for a task. You met it in Subchapter three point three, as scientific management's modern descendant. In kaizen, standard work is the essential baseline every proposed improvement is measured against. And the reason is worth dwelling on. Without a clearly documented current method, there is no stable reference point. You simply cannot tell whether a proposed change is an improvement at all. Finally, visual management makes a process's current status, and any deviation from it, immediately visible. Anyone looking at the work area can see it, without a separate report, or a specialist to interpret it.
Plan-Do-Check-Act
A Cycle With Discipline Built In
Kaizen's improvement work is usually structured through the plan, do, check, act cycle. Plan a change, and predict its expected result before you test it. Do, by implementing the change on a small, controlled scale. Check the actual result, against the prediction you made beforehand. And act on what you learned. Adopt the change more broadly, adjust it, or abandon it. The step that's easiest to skip is the one that matters most. The prediction. Stating a prediction before testing is what gives the cycle its discipline. Without one, any result can be read afterward as confirming whatever the tester already believed. That's the same confirmation-bias pattern Subchapter four point four described in McGregor's self-fulfilling cycle. A prediction written down in advance can be wrong. And that is exactly what makes it useful.
Waste and Safety
What Kaizen Targets, and What It Needs
Kaizen directs its attention at one thing in particular, which is waste. Waste is any activity that consumes resources without adding value the customer actually wants or needs. It descends directly from the motion studies of Subchapter three point six. There, the Gilbreths eliminated unnecessary elementary motions from a task. Commonly targeted categories include excess motion, waiting time, and unnecessary transportation of materials. Also overproduction beyond current need, excess inventory, and defects requiring rework. And one that's easy to overlook. Unused human capability. That's the ideas and insight of the people closest to the work, which a process never captures or acts on. Kaizen also depends on a precondition, psychological safety. Workers must feel safe reporting a problem without fear of blame. That includes problems their own past decisions may have contributed to. An organization that punishes or embarrasses whoever reports a problem teaches people to stop reporting. That silently shuts down the entire mechanism kaizen depends on. This connects to the team dynamics covered fully in Subchapter six point seven.
Reengineering
Fundamental, Radical, Dramatic
Business process reengineering takes the opposite approach. It is defined as the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes, to achieve dramatic improvement. Each element of that definition carries specific weight. Fundamental rethinking means starting from why the process exists at all, rather than accepting its current form. Radical redesign means reinventing the process from the ground up, not adjusting its existing steps. Dramatic improvement means targeting order-of-magnitude gains. Not the steady, compounding small gains kaizen pursues. The premise behind all of this is that existing processes encode obsolete assumptions. Those assumptions concern available technology, organizational structure, or customer expectations. They were reasonable when the process was first designed, but they may no longer hold. If that's true, improving the process doesn't fix it. It simply preserves the wrong underlying design, more efficiently.
Reengineering Principles
3 Principles That Follow From the Premise
Reengineering's core principles follow directly from that premise. First, organize around outcomes, rather than around the existing sequence of tasks. Second, have the people who use a process's output perform the process themselves, wherever practical. The alternative is routing work through a specialized department. Often that happens purely because that's how the work was once organized. Third, capture information once, at its source. Don't re-collect or re-enter the same information at multiple points as it moves through the process. Notice what the three principles have in common. Each one targets a design choice that may have made sense when it was made. Each assumes that the reason may no longer hold, and asks you to check.
The Record
Reengineering, Stated Honestly
Reengineering's actual track record deserves the same honesty this course has applied throughout. Documented accounts of reengineering initiatives report high failure rates, against the dramatic goals originally set for them. In practice, the approach also became closely associated with workforce reduction. Redesigning a process from scratch frequently eliminated roles the previous, less efficient design had required. To be fair, some individual reengineering efforts did produce genuine, substantial improvement. But the honest assessment, stated plainly, is this. The most dramatic claimed results were generally not met across documented initiatives. It's worth being precise about what kind of verdict that is. It differs from the reanalysis of the Hawthorne studies, in Subchapter four point two. There, a specific finding was shown to rest on weak original evidence. Here, the concern is a documented pattern of outcomes falling well short of stated goals, across many real attempts.
Table 5.6.1
Kaizen and Reengineering Compared
Table five point six point one sets the two approaches side by side, across five dimensions. Scope. Kaizen is narrow, one process or work area at a time. Reengineering is broad, an entire process rethought from scratch. Pace. Kaizen is slow, continuous, and ongoing. Reengineering is fast, run as a defined project with a start and an end. Who drives it. Kaizen is driven by frontline workers, close to the work. Reengineering is driven by senior leadership, and specialist redesign teams. Risk. Kaizen's risk is low per change, and its gains compound over time. Reengineering's risk is high. A single failed redesign can be very costly. And workforce impact. Kaizen's is generally positive, because it builds workforce capability. Reengineering's is frequently negative, and associated with workforce reduction. Neither column is simply better. They are different tools, with very different risk profiles.
Choosing Between Them
Match the Approach to an Honest Diagnosis
So how do you choose? The choice follows directly from an honest diagnosis of the process itself. Suppose the process is basically sound. Its assumptions still hold, and its purpose is still worth serving. It just isn't running as efficiently as it could. Then kaizen's steady, low-risk accumulation of small gains fits well. Picture a customer-request process at a fictional company. Kaizen would shorten a repeated walk to a parts bin. A suggestion removes one redundant approval step, and standard work is revised after a small trial. Over weeks, those small gains compound into a meaningfully faster process. Now suppose the process is not basically sound. It rests on assumptions that no longer hold. Then incremental improvement just polishes a fundamentally wrong design. Radical redesign, despite its higher risk, becomes the more honest response. Reengineering would rebuild the approval workflow around the customer's request. A five-department handoff chain becomes one team owning the outcome, and data is captured once instead of five times. The new process replaces the old one all at once. The potential gain is larger, and so is the risk. The skill is matching the approach to the diagnosis, not to fashion, or to a leader's taste for dramatic action.
Case Vignette
Harborline Redesigns a Process That Only Needed Attention
Here is a composite case, constructed for instruction. Harborline Manufacturing's customer-order approval process had grown mildly slow over several years. A handful of redundant sign-off steps were adding roughly a day of unnecessary delay. Each had been added for a reasonable individual reason, and those reasons no longer applied. Leadership wanted a visible win. It commissioned a full reengineering of the entire order-to-delivery process, by outside consultants. The disruption was substantial. Staff had to learn an entirely new process, end to end. Several roles were eliminated, and the new process took months to stabilize. During that time, order errors actually rose above their previous level, before settling below it. The final process was faster. But not dramatically faster than simply removing the redundant sign-offs would likely have been. The underlying process had been basically sound. It had just gathered a little friction, exactly the situation kaizen suits. Leadership never asked whether the process's fundamental assumptions were obsolete. It took on reengineering's risk to solve a problem incremental attention could have fixed, at a fraction of the cost.
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