Kaizen for Kids

Self-improvement isn’t the province of adults only! Enlist your kids in their own self-improvement program. Call it Kaizen for Kids.

Kaizen is a Japanese term meaning “continuous process improvement.” It’s been used throughout the business world to reach toward zero defects in production processes. Ingrid Cummings, author of The Vigorous Mind, has adapted Kaizen to the larger world, where we’re all trying to be better versions of ourselves. And instill in our kids habits of mind that will serve them well in their adult lives.

Here’s how to introduce Kaizen into a household with kids. Let’s use the usual getting-ready-in-the-morning chaos as our example of a process that could, um, usually use a healthy dose of process improvement.

Some evening, after dinner and before homework, sit down at the kitchen table with your kids and a white-board. “We’re borrowing a play from the Japanese,” you say. “It’s called Kaizen, and it calls for analyzing something and making sure all the moving parts are working together efficiently.” With that, brainstorm all the various components involved in getting everybody bathed, fed, clothed, and transported on a typical school morning.

Your list might include hair combing, cereal eating, book collecting, dog feeding, teeth brushing, and bed making. Choose just one of those to-do’s and have your child enumerate the smaller components. For instance, under Cereal Eating, you must be sure to have on hand cereal; clean dishes; and milk. Ask the kids to really think hard about where the process sometimes goes awry. Maybe they discover that some days, the Cheerios are down to just seven O’s in the bottom of the box. Then notate just one particular step, no matter how small, that you are all committed to taking to avert the problem. It may involve creating a standing item on the weekly grocery list to include Cheerios.

After a couple weeks of implementing this Kaizen-inspired improvement, turn to another category – perhaps the gathering up of books, assignments, permission slips, and other school flotsam. Have your child analyze the where-when-why-how of that ‘process,’ looking for mis-cues, mistakes, MIA’s, and any other chronic breakdowns in that area. Then notate on the white-board how you’re going to avert the just one problem in this area, while – and this is key -- continuing to hold the gains from the Cereal-Eating Kaizen.

The whiteboard is so important! Particularly for children, it represents accountability and commitment. Review your Kaizen with your kids every week, and offer rewards for eagle-eyed observation of where the “process” of the morning routine runs off the rails.

Discuss with your kids about how your Kaizen system is a big important step beyond a mere checklist. As powerful as checklists are, they don’t call for the kind of brain-building analysis that Kaizen does. Kaizen also asks that you continually look for that next additional baby-step improvement that every process requires. Once you’re humming along with Cereal Eating, you may decide that you want to switch up your morning meal with the addition of fresh fruit, which will require the process to be re-analyzed for snags, slowdowns, breakdowns, or any other inefficiency.

You can readily see that the steady, accumulation of these small, almost insignificant changes will really add up before long to represent amazing improvement in the morning routine. Congratulations. You are now in the Kaizen slipstream.

Further, it’s easy to imagine how this level of rigor will spill over into your child’s academics and future prospects. You are modeling for them the very essence of successful leadership, discipline, and accountability. Oh, yeah: you’re learning it, too.

The secret is the elegant, under-appreciated simplicity of Kaizen: continuous, incremental baby steps taken in the right direction. It’s an ancient Japanese Zen philosophy that advocates taking small, even trivial steps to accomplish any large goal. At a simplistic level, this is how Toyota Motor Corporation has risen to dominance in the field of auto manufacture. If they can build a better car with Kaizen, I’m certain you can build a better morning.

Ingrid Cummings,
Author of The Vigorous Mind