We’ve all heard of the term Kaizen, and we all know that it is the practice of continuous improvement.
The practice of Kaizen has served many of the teams and organisations I have worked with well. Teams that were previously floundering in mediocrity grew into great teams by the fact that they frequently inspected on how they were doing and gradually improved after each inspection.
However, are there situations where gradual improvement may not be enough?
Jurgen Appelo seems to think so. In his book Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders. He says:
“Although most literature on Lean Software Development preaches Kaizen (continuous improvement), only a few of them mention that teams also need Kaikaku (radical improvement).
Thus, when approaching a problem situation, it might require radical improvement to start with (Kaikaku), then be continuously improved (Kaizen)”
Mike Cohn echoes this, albeit not explicitly, in his book Succeeding with Agile. He writes about two patterns for adopting Scrum, Start Small with a pilot team and then gradually spread the adoption of the framework as you learn (Kaizen) or Go All In, where every team in the organisation undergoes a radical change and adopts Scrum overnight (Kaikaku).
I remember my first experience of Agile and Scrum. We took a ‘start small’ approach, but I now wish we had taken a more radical approach. We had success locally within our team, but we didn’t achieve the impact that we perhaps could have got organisationally. Kaikaku is also known as Breakthrough Kaizen and I feel that we failed to get the wide scale breakthrough that we desired.
So if your team or your organisation is thinking about improving or changing, whether that be an adoption of an Agile framework or some other kind of change, then you might be thinking ‘What type of improvement should we practice, Kaizen or Kaikaku?’.
Well, the fact of the matter is that it depends. Each problem will have its own complexities, and sometimes these problems will call for the practice of continuous improvement and some will need radical change.
Appelo also states that:
“When trying to improve the current situation…, the first thing to do is to make sure you know your current position”.
By knowing your current position you will be able to more easily determine your next improvement move, whether that be a small Kaizen step, or a large Kaikaku leap.
In truth, your improvement journey is likely to be a combination of small steps and giant leaps. The key thing is to know where you are and where you want to go.