How can a system developed to improve productivity in Japanese industry help you achieve your goals? Come discover what Kaizen is and how its 3 practices can help you increase efficiency, whether you're a gardener or Giorno Giovanna!
I'll be much appreaciated if you Votes, Reblogs or give any Tips. Thanks and have good reading! 🍀
What is Kaizen? Improve your Life!
Kaizen is a term that originated in Japan, meaning "continuous improvement." It conveys the idea of "continuously making various small improvements", which incrementally bring great results over time. The Japanese industry was greatly impacted by this technique, which led to gains in productivity and quality. While the West experiences major innovations, companies using Kaizen focus on small, overall improvements, delivering something increasingly better and more efficient – a silent improvement.
However, even though Kaizen originated in Japanese industry, it can be applied to people's lives. An interesting excerpt that illustrates this is: "Strive daily to improve the skills you possess and to add new tools to those you already use." It may be difficult to believe that this can truly improve things, because humans, due to their survival history, tend to focus more on the present, but surely there's some activity you've been doing for a long time that, if you look back, you'll realize was initially difficult, but is now easier.
Kaizen addresses precisely this, but it brings awareness so that you intentionally make constant improvements. Unlike other methods that focus on a single point, Kaizen emphasizes "adding new tools to those you already use." In today's world, where AI receives inputs and can handle many tasks from different areas, this ability to work with multiple tools will be very helpful.
The 3 Practices of Kaizen!
In an article on the subject, I found a topic that discussed Kaizen practices in the company that everyone should follow: Housekeeping, Muda Elimination, and Standardization. Through Housekeeping, they learn about discipline by keeping things organized. In the second part, "Muda" means useless or wasteful, so the idea is to eliminate everything that generates waste; any activity that does not add value is muda. Finally, standardization is the best way to perform the work, what is the best order of processes to carry out the activity.
The best part is that in the elimination section of MUDA, several examples were given: Muda of overproduction, Muda of inventory, Muda of waiting, Muda of motion, Muda of transportation, Muda of producing rejects, Muda of processing. This reminded me VERY MUCH of the scene from the anime JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, "Muda, Muda, Muda!", which is used by Dio Brando and later by Giorno Giovanna.
How can Kaizen improve your productivity?
Interestingly, while reading a book on a completely different subject (tech), you won't believe me even though I'm saying this, I ended up finding the concept of Kaizen appearing right at the beginning of the book in one of the topics in the preface. In this topic, the beginning presents a "parable" about repetition of habits, in which a tourist asks the gardener how he kept the garden of the place so perfect. The answer was, "It's easy, I just remove the dew every morning, mow the lawn every day, and level it once a week." The tourist was impressed and replied, "Is that all?", while the gardener responded, "Exactly, do that for 500 years and you'll also have a beautiful lawn."
The continuation of this is that to have a beautiful garden, you need "only" small amounts of daily care. You don't need to start at 100; start at 0 and improve each day, 1% better every day, which makes it less tiring and, in the long run, yields incredible results, just like the garden will. In this sense, the insight we can take to improve our lives and make them better is to choose routines, actions, and projects that contribute to achieving your goal and that you can improve little by little. For example, in the case of the garden, the gardener listed: 1 - I remove the dew every morning; 2 - I mow the lawn every day; 3 - I level it once a week. The idea is for you to list the key activities and look for ways to optimize them.
