Continuous Improvement Is The Enemy

The Obsolescence of Incremental Change

“Continuous improvement is obsolete,” boldly declared Philip Crosby, the influential quality management expert. Crosby argued that instead of incrementally improving flawed processes, the focus should be on developing things right the first time. His ZeeDee philosophy stood in stark contrast to the widespread mantra of “kaizen” – the relentless pursuit of small, incremental optimisations.

Kaizen’s Unintended Consequences

In the business world today, the kaizen mindset of continuous improvement is deeply embedded in organisational culture. While well-intentioned, taken to the extreme, an obsession with kaizen can potentially inhibit truly transformative progress from occurring.

Getting Stuck in a Rut

When teams concentrate solely on incremental kaizen, they can get trapped making small, incremental improvements without ever questioning shared assumptions and beliefs, nor the fundamental process, product, or business model itself. Their efforts stay narrowly confined within the existing paradigm.

Descending into Bureaucracy

Over time, layer upon layer of new policies, checks, and overhead accumulate through kaizen-based refinements. Once streamlined systems slowly devolve into bureaucratic tangles choking on their own complexity – optimising themselves into inflexibility.

Missed Opportunities

Another subtle byproduct is the opportunity cost incurred by devoting resources exclusively to tiny enhancements rather than exploring bold new assumptions, and new new innovations. While teams tinker with diminishing marginal gains, disruptive competitors can leapfrog ahead.

Balancing with Kaikaku

To Crosby’s point, organisations have the option to balance kaizen’s continuous improvement with intense periods of “kaikaku” – the complete reexamination and reinvention of core assumptions, beliefs, processes, technologies, and paradigms – from a clean slate perspective. Kaikaku catalyses the breakthroughs while kaizen optimises within the new model.

An iterative cycle alternating between kaikaku-driven transformation and kaizen-driven refinement allows enterprises to realise their fullest potential. Reinvention precedes meaningful optimisation, just as Crosby advocated getting things right before perpetually enhancing them.

Limiting Kaizen’s Scope

Front-line process experts can still identify real-time improvements, but the scope is limited to enhancing defined workflows rather than redesigning entire operating models through kaizen.

Achieving Ambidexterity

A limitation of kaizen purists is embracing continuous improvement as a sequential, single-threaded process. Breakthrough companies are ambidextrous – simultaneously driving kaizen-based operational discipline on current offerings while proactively investing in kaikaku innovation streams to reimagine the future (See also: Prod•gnosis) .

Organisational success demands the ability to concurrently optimise for today’s profits while exploring transformative opportunities for tomorrow’s growth  An imbalanced focus on kaizen alone can breed complacency and blindness to disruptive innovations on the horizon.

Crosby’s Lasting Wisdom

As Crosby suggested decades ago, getting it truly right up front through kaikaku is a vital prerequisite before the incremental refinement of kaizen. Continuous improvement is indeed a potential pitfall when it becomes an excuse for continually enhancing flawed models rather than reimagining entirely new ones.