Urbantrans ANZ

Author: Robert Maurer, PhD
Released: 2004

Rooted in the two thousand-year-old wisdom of the Tao Te Ching--"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"--Kaizen is the art of making great and lasting change through small, steady increments.

What is Kaizen? Kaizen has been used by Japanese businesses since the 1950s. Organisational and personal change efforts are also often launched as drastic change initiatives – diets cutting out unhealthy foods all at once, quitting smoking by going ‘cold turkey’. These are like New Years’ resolutions that either never get off the ground, or start with a bang and then fizzle out quickly. They are all too reliant on an initial burst of enthusiasm, and highly prone to fail as quickly as they started (falling back to old habits).

Kaizen focuses on small, comfortable steps toward improvement. BIG POINT: Very simple, small changes in behaviour lead to subtle changes in attitude. This key point emerges again and again in research: many change programs begin by targeting changes in attitude, assuming they will lead to subsequent changes in behaviour. The reverse approach appears more fruitful.