Culture of Kaizen overview

(whooshing) (soft music) - Hi there, my name is Ron Pareira and I want to welcome you to this course focused on how to go about creating and leading a culture of Kaizen. Now, as longtime Gemba Academy customers know, we've covered many aspects of the Kaizen topic before, in fact, we have a course called the Kaizen way. And whether will naturally be some overlap between these two courses, we're very excited to share many new aspects on the topic. Well, specifically during this course, we're going to spend most of our time focusing on how to best collaborate and influence others towards engaging in continuous improvement. You see, the tools of continuous improvement are obviously important. That's why we've created more than 650 videos focused on various Lean and Six Sigma tools and we're constantly working on creating others that may add value. But here's the thing, if you neglect the human side of continuous improvement, it really doesn't matter how good you or your organization are with tools like five S or Value Stream Mapping since you'll almost certainly fail to build a rock solid culture of Kaizen. As such, in this course, we hope to convince you that a culture of Kaizen is indeed essential to achieving and sustaining improvements long term. So throughout this course, we're going to explore many different topics, including how habits both good and bad, are developed and if needed can be changed or modified in order to achieve a high performance culture. We are also going to explore how our brains work, which admittedly may sound a bit strange, but you'd be amazed at how subtle changes to the way we interact and collaborate with people can radically impact not only our own individual behavior, but overall organizational success. But with this said in this first module, we're going to get things started by offering an overview of what we mean when we speak of a culture of Kaizen. And why any company or organization no matter the industry may want to adopt such a strategy in order to sustain excellent performance. Well, specifically, by the end of this module, you'll know what we mean when we speak of a company's culture. And we'll also review something we spent a lot of time exploring and other Gemba Academy courses and that's Kaizen. We'll review what it is and what it isn't. And as a hint, it's far more than a three to five day rapid improvement event. Next, we'll spend some time contrasting the difference between so called adaptive and non adaptive organizational cultures, while also sharing ways to recognize the warning signs of non adaptive behaviors in your own organization. And finally, by the end of this module, you'll know what the ABCs of organizational culture are all about and how to use that model to help guide your effort to build a culture of Kaizen. Now then, to get things started, I'd like to spend some time talking about what a culture is. We hear a lot about culture but what does it really mean? Well, at its most basic level, when I say that culture is what a group of people or society would recognize as the way we do things around here. For example, in the context of business, we may say a company has a culture of teamwork, or a culture of competition or even a culture of corruption. Now, Herb Kellerher, chairman of Southwest Airlines may have summed that up best when he said, "Culture is what people do when no one is looking." And while these descriptions of an organizational culture may be true, we need to dive deeper before we can gain a deeper understanding of what a culture of Kaizen is. Well, specifically, it's important to understand that our beliefs and values ultimately create behaviors and actions that result in either good or bad organizational performance. Along these lines, in order to create a strong, successful culture of Kaizen, we can't simply look at how we do things, instead, we also need to understand what we do and why we do them. Well to help us accomplish this, I'd like to introduce the ABCs of organizational culture, which had been adapted from the work of Professor Edwards Shine. Now at the top of the diagram, we have artifacts, which are things we can see with our own eyes. Now, artifacts can range from the uniforms employees wear to the new lines recently laid down on the floor as a result of last week's five S event. Now, you can think of artifacts as what we do and what other people see us doing. In the middle, we have behaviors which represent the conscious and unconscious habits and routines that all of us follow within the organization. Now we'll dedicate an entire module on the topic of habits later in the course. And lastly, at the base of the diagram we have convictions. Now these mostly invisible characteristics, explain why we do what we do. And as we'll explore later in the course, understanding our why or our purpose or cause just maybe one of the single biggest breakthroughs of our personal and professional lives. Well, when thoughtfully combined artifacts, behaviors and convictions provide the framework that allows us to create cultures of Kaizen. Next, another topic that we'd like to explore in this module is what John Cotter and Jane Haskett referred to as adaptive and non adaptive culture, since understanding the difference is key to creating a high performance culture. Well first, non adaptive cultures are ones where arrogance, selfish motivations, and high levels of bureaucracy exist within the organization. Now this creates companies that may perform well on the short term, while conditions are favorable but are totally in inflexible and unable to adapt to change over the long term. Now studies have shown that non adaptive organizations grow much slower and far less profitably due to this. Conversely, adaptive culture support an organization's immediate needs while also supporting longer term strategies. Now this is done by respecting people and giving them the autonomy and trust they deserve to make the changes needed in order to meet new challenges. Now, this results in improvements to all aspects of their lives both personally and professionally. As such throughout the rest of this course it's our intention to demonstrate how our convictions or deeply held beliefs about Kaizen actually encourage adaptive cultures through the practice of cooperative, customer focused problem solving routines. And we also intend to show how the way we interact and treat one another ultimately determines our cultural destiny. Okay, well to wrap up this first module, I'd like to spend some time talking about the word Kaizen. Now, as we learned in a Kaizen way course, loosely translated the word Kaizen means to change for the better. And we also learned that with Kaizen, there's actually a sense of breaking down the current process, removing the unnecessary parts and putting it back together in an improved manner. And we also learned that Kaizen is far more than three to five day rapid improvement events, even though Kaizen events can be extremely powerful. Now, in this course, we'd like to expand on the definition of Kaizen by broadly defining it as people centered, scientific problem solving, directed towards the benefit of society. And, as we hope to do throughout this course, we want to pay special emphasis on the phrase, people centered because more than anything else, it's the convictions people carry in their heads and how we interact with one another that creates culture. You see in the end, our success with Kaizen or really any sort of continuous improvement ultimately lies in our ability to work with and positively influence people. Like we mentioned earlier, the many tools of continuous improvement are obviously very important but if the hearts and minds of your associates aren't behind your efforts, you will almost certainly fail to create any sort of sustainable culture of Kaizen. Okay, and that wraps up this first overview module. In our next lesson, we're going to turn our attention to the topic of Respect. Well specifically we plan to talk about why respecting humanity is arguably the most important aspect to creating a culture of Kaizen. So we'll speak to you soon.