Continuous improvement is a cornerstone of lean thinking. It involves continually evaluating what we do and making adjustments to improve. Rather than treating change as a temporary disruption to endure until reaching a specific goal, continuous improvement embraces change as an ongoing, positive force.
Those who adopt a mindset of continuous improvement believe that by regularly examining both what they produce and how they produce it, they can gradually refine both the product and the process. This consistent adaptation enables them to achieve performance levels that would otherwise remain out of reach.
For managers of the business, the status quo feels comfortable. It is safe. Our jobs appear to be steady. Our business process is well-known and easily executed and trained. We are growing. Or, we are huge and entrenched. We are too big to fail. Everything is fine.
Until it isn’t.
In this article, I explore the historical roots of continuous improvement, tracing its evolution from American ingenuity to the Japanese cultural drive for refinement and perfection. I discuss its transformative impact on the auto industry, the key elements necessary for improvement, and practical methods you can adopt today to implement continuous improvement in your life, work group, or organization.
The Rise of Scientific Management
Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote a groundbreaking book, The Principles of Scientific Management, in 1911, outlining a method to deconstruct work into its most basic tasks. His objective was to make workers interchangeable by standardizing tasks. By breaking work into its simplest components, each task could be analyzed for efficiency, timed for performance, and optimized for improvement.
Taylor changed the face of work and helped usher in the Industrial Revolution. His work gave rise to assembly lines, increased efficiency, streamlined production processes, and reduced wasted time and resources. Work became more predictable, measurable, and standardized. Improvements in output were seen particularly in industries where repetition and standardization were important.
Taylor’s ideas were adopted by companies across the nation and eventually across the planet. Even today, most managers seek these outcomes from their labor forces to cut costs and increase efficiency.
But, Taylor’s work also caused problems. Workers given simple, small jobs were dehumanized and felt no sense of value or investment in their jobs. Worker dissatisfaction increased, leading to the rise of labor unions. While adopting Taylor’s methods led to short-term gains, there were long-term costs for which companies paid dearly as the world went from skilled craftsmen to one person screwing in one screw over and over.
The Quality Movement
After World War II, General Douglas MacArthur led the effort to rebuild Japan as part of the American strategy to contain communism. A proponent of W. Edwards Deming’s work, MacArthur introduced the statistician’s ideas to Japanese industries. Deming, an MIT-trained expert in quality management, had written extensively about improving work processes using principles now recognized as foundational to lean practices. While his theories were largely overlooked in the United States, they resonated deeply in Japan, aligning with the country’s cultural emphasis on precision and continuous improvement. Deming urged leaders to prioritize and sustain ongoing advancements in quality, a philosophy that profoundly shaped Japan’s post-war industrial success.
Kaizen [改善], meaning “improvement” or “betterment,” is a deeply rooted Japanese concept. In Japan, those who practice any art—whether calligraphy, the tea ceremony, gardening, or martial arts—embark on a lifelong journey of personal growth, continually striving to perfect their skills.
Japanese culture has several inherent traits that facilitated the adoption of lean concepts:
- Teamwork: Japan’s collectivist society places a high value on humble contributions to the greater whole rather than individual glory and achievement. As a result, Japanese teams tend to form cohesive groups, working collaboratively to support one another—often more seamlessly than in individualistic cultures.
- Precision and Attention to Detail: Many traditional Japanese arts emphasize extreme minimalism and meticulous precision, traits that naturally extend to manufacturing and production processes.
- Transparency: While Japanese society values politeness, children are taught from a young age to embrace feedback as a means of improvement. Allowing quality to suffer to protect an individual’s feelings is not a cultural norm, fostering an environment where constructive criticism is welcomed.
The adoption of continuous improvement practices profoundly transformed Toyota’s reputation in the U.S. Initially regarded as a producer of substandard, small, and unattractive vehicles perceived as low-quality and cheap, Toyota is now synonymous with reliability and quality. Today, Toyota commands a premium for its highly sought-after vehicles.
Getting Started with Continuous Improvement
A single keystone cultural feature is essential for continuous improvement to take root and deliver results: transparency. The culture of the organization must support honest conversations about how products are made and their quality. In most human organizations, there is intense political pressure to avoid speaking the truth about processes and activities that hinder quality work more than they support it. Many organizations struggle to tolerate an employee candidly saying, “I wouldn’t pay for this. It’s not good.”
Transparency is often stifled by organizational structures. For instance, no one will criticize a product if employees risk being fired for doing so. If influential individuals earn bonuses for convincing leadership that a product is a good idea or of high quality—rather than being rewarded for honesty—fear will prevent anyone from pointing out its flaws. Organizational leaders must eliminate incentives for toxic positivity and create an environment where truth-tellers feel safe to say, “Your baby is ugly.”
How can an organization improve when its culture effectively forbids identifying what most needs to be fixed?
Applying Continuous Improvement
If transparency does not exist, there is no reason to continue to attempt continuous improvement. In an organization where transparency is dampened by fear, improvements will only occur in areas that are obvious to everyone and free of political entanglements. This may or may not yield meaningful results, but the odds suggest it likely will not.
If transparency exists, the truth can be examined, and decisions can be based on accurate information and observations. Three essential qualities drive effective improvement:
- Cadence: Improvement works best when it follows a regular cadence, allowing for small changes to be made over short intervals. Shorter cycles between feedback and improvement reduce risk and enable fine-tuning over time.
- Relentlessness: Improvement should never stop. The status quo must not be allowed to take root. What you do today should differ significantly from last year, and next year’s practices should evolve beyond today’s.
- Small bets: Do not try to boil the ocean. Make a small improvement, take a small risk, see what happens. Roll the change back if you don’t like the results. Try another small change.
Many relentless, small changes on a cadence lead to big improvements over time.
Resist Tradition
The biggest obstacle to progress is tradition. Last year’s brilliant idea, which may have won a trophy for a powerful individual, often becomes this year’s burden, impossible to challenge or change. Do not let traditions become untouchable simply because altering them is seen as a transgression.
The leader who says, “We need to embrace continuous improvement,” and also says, “We don’t want to change our culture,” has embarked on a doomed adventure. Culture is every behavior that happens because at some point in the past it worked. Not wanting to change the culture is not wanting to change. If the current culture does not support continuous improvement, then you have to choose: improve or keep your culture the same.
