Kaizen: One Small Step

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Kaizen: One Small Step

Over the weekend I read a small book by Robert Maurer entitled One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way (Workman Publishing, 2004). A psychologist, Maurer has focused much of his career on the study and implementation of success systems relating to change. In other words: how people succeed in making/maintaining changes—anything from losing weight to transforming yourself into an effective CEO or public speaker.

Maurer describes the typical western approach to change as a “drastic” process targeted to a quick turnaround, one in which you aim to obtain the biggest results in the smallest amount of time. He uses the business school term innovation to describe this process, which, he says, often doesn’t work in the long term.

Contrast this with the alternative strategy of kaizen, which consists of small steps compounding and eventually leading to much larger results. According to Maurer, kaizen actually got its start in the U. S. around 1940, with the realization that the country had to implement large-scale production of military equipment in factories that had been producing refrigerators, automobiles, and the like. One government course taught at factories urged mangers to make continuous small improvements toward changing to a war footing.

After the war, this philosophy was transported to Japan by American occupation forces, and it played a big part in that country’s recovery: one company that used kaizen with great success was Toyota. “As you probably know,” writes Maurer, “Japanese businesses—which rebuilt themselves on the bedrock of small steps—soon rocketed to unheard-of levels of productivity. Small steps were so successful that the Japanese gave them a name of their own: kaizen.” (In Japanese, kaizen means “continuous improvement.”)

But what interests me here is not the war, or Japan, or even kaizen. I’m intrigued by the concept and history of those small steps.

To me the most powerful tenet of Getting Things Done is in breaking down a large task into small, take-action steps. That’s an extremely simple but powerful idea, and it’s made GTD quite popular of late. This breaking down just makes sense. There’s something you have to do, but it seems so overwhelming that you can’t get started. So you break that great big task into little task pieces. You pick up the first task—quite manageable now that it’s bite-sized—and accomplish it. Then you pick up the next.

The thing is, people have always known about the value of small steps. In his book, Maurer twice quotes the 6th century BC Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu:

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with the first step.

Confront the difficult when it is still easy: Accomplish the great task by a series of small acts.

Some people think Lao Tzu actually lived in the 4th rather than 6th Century BC. But anyway you slice it, be it 8000 or 6000 years ago, the sage was Getting Things Done.

Maurer quotes others, of all different backgrounds, throughout the book. My two favorites are the great basketball coach, John Wooden (“Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.”) and the writer, John Steinbeck (“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One days’ work is all that I can permit myself to contemplate.”).

So simple, so easy, so powerful: break it down into small steps and you’ll get it done. And yet we humans have a hard time adhering to this advice. I don’t know why…do you?

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© Suzanne Rodriguez
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