Many times, we resist change because change seems too big. Change is easier to accept, and to practice, when it’s small. This is the secret power of Kaizen.

Originally a Japanese management concept designed to improve business practices, Kaizen is a process aimed at reducing or eliminating unnecessary physical and mental work. It encourages people to create and perform experiments as part of their daily work lives in order to become aware of and eliminate waste in their jobs. The ultimate goal of Kaizen is to accomplish more by doing less.

In the book Gemba Kaizen, Masaaki Imai quotes Edward C. Johnson, III, chairman and CEO of Fidelity Investments: “Kaizen — the spirit that whatever you’re doing, you can do better — gave us the foundation we needed to work as a team in setting and reaching higher service standards. It also helped us successfully weather a rough patch in our investment business. . . . Over the years, we’ve seen many strategies for management success come and go. In my experience, Kaizen is different. It’s not a fad. It helps us focus in a very basic way on how we do our work. The process of doing our work becomes an end in itself as well as a means of gratification. For me, that’s where the real joy comes in.”

A business associate of mine recently had lunch with an executive from Fidelity Investments. The Fidelity executive shared with my friend that Fidelity has more than forty thousand employees and that the term “Kaizen,” though not written down anywhere in the company’s materials, is on the lips of all forty thousand employees.

Then, just by coincidence, a few days after this I met with a local Fidelity representative. Within the first few minutes of our conversation, the representative mentioned the practice of Kaizen. He said that at their weekly staff meetings, each person was expected to address how they had implemented Kaizen in their work — each person was expected to identify one small improvement they made or planned to make in the coming week. This sounded to me like a practical and effective method of enjoying the process of change, rather than resisting and grasping at what is known and comfortable.

Reduce your own resistance to change and practice Kaizen in your own life. Ask yourself: What is one change you could make in your life today that would have an impact in the quality of your day? Everything is constantly changing — your body, your intentions, your life, the environment — and this simple practice lets you gently enter and dance with the stream of change.

Take a moment to reflect and write down your answer to the question — identify one change in your life. This change doesn’t need to be large — just one small, even seemingly insignificant difference. This change could be in the way you do something, it could be something you stop doing, or it could be a small adjustment of your outlook or attitude. By focusing on one item, giving it your attention, and measuring it, you can reduce resistance and increase your effectiveness.
Traditional Kaizen practice is generally guided by three core principles:

1) Results: Create benchmarks and measurements for a process in your work, or for a particular project. Create a way to quantify the impact of the change.
2) Systemic thinking: Pay attention to the larger picture. How does what you do fit into the overall system? Who connects with what you do? How can these systems and relationships be measured and improved?
3) A nonjudgmental, nonblaming attitude: This is an important part of the Kaizen practice. Not only do judgment and blaming interfere with making improvements, but judgment and blaming are by themselves unnecessary and wasteful, and encourage more resistance.

People at all levels of an organization can participate in Kaizen, from the CEO down. And Kaizen can be practiced in any setting: by individuals, by small or large groups, by families. Kaizen is not a competition; it operates under the principle that an individual cannot benefit at another’s expense. It is also never static or finished. In Kaizen methodology, one makes changes, monitors results, and then adjusts, in a continual cycle.

Here is an overview of that cycle:

1) Pay attention to the details, especially the small ones, of your activity.
2) Create goals or benchmarks and ways to compare what you actually do to those benchmarks.
3) Create innovations and put these into action.
4) Pay attention and measure the results of these innovations.
5) Find a way to incorporate these improvements, in ways that are practical and concrete.
6) Continue this cycle.