There can be no kaizen without standards.
Or is it without standards there can be no kaizen? Dammit, someone needs to standardise this saying! Oh wait, yes, it doesn’t take much googling to find out it was Ohno himself said this and I can now categorically say, it is the former and my memory serves me correctly. Begone, memory lapses, foresooth!
Most Western organisations treat standardisation as one initiative among many. A tool to get through an audit or suchlike. The Kaizen flag says something different, however. Look how Standardisation occupies half the system. It is symbolic as well as structural. Beautiful.
It implies, think thee not, that Kaizen is built on standards. Innovation is constrained by standards, or is it better to say, it is paced by standards. Nay, I would go further and say, it is paced by leadership’s time and commitment. And knowledge of the role of standards as a system.
This is a dependency. Remove the blue section and the rest of the flag collapses. Kaizen without standards becomes random improvement. Innovation without standards becomes disconnected experimentation.
Standards are not the opposite of change. We do see this perennial argument of standards boxing in our western spirit of innovation, but really? They are the condition that makes change cumulative instead of chaotic.
Standardised Work Is a Stability Engine
Look at the direction of force in the flag. Innovation pulls forward. Kaizen tightens performance. Standardisation holds the system in shape, spanning the x axis like an ocean. That last function is misunderstood. Standardised work is not about freezing behaviour. It is about absorbing variation so the system doesn’t tear itself apart while improving.
Every operation generates natural variation:
- skill variation
- variation
- environmental variation
- decision variation
Standardised work reduces the amplitude of that variation to a manageable range. Only then can Kaizen detect signal from noise. Without standards, we are trying to improve a moving target which may as well just be storytelling.
Standards Protect Energy: Another way to read the flag
Standards are an energy conservation system.
When routine work is unstable, people spend cognitive energy on: remembering, negotiating, interpreting and compensating
That leaves less energy for: learning, problem-solving, innovation and writing a decent blog. Standardised work removes unnecessary decisions. It protects our ability to focus on the right things. It extends our attention. It creates surplus capacity inside the human system that sits inside the operating system.
Without standards, Mono becomes experimentation and Hito becomes adaptation. Nothing accumulates. Standards are what allow learning to stack into real performance improvement.
So, make a choice. Be slow and tribal, a hostage to change. Or be nimble, be quick. Do something with a stick. No, that can’t be right. But certainly embrace change as there is nothing to fear with a blue ocean of standards.
