Kaizen: Japanese for continuous and incremental improvement, a business philosophy about working practices and efficiency; improvement in productivity or performance.

I’ve helped a lot of businesses both inside and outside of collision repair create a “kaizen model,” and in all cases, the initial concern is the same: “I don’t think my people will tolerate this level of change.” I remember my first experience with a sensei who explained the basics about what we were about to attempt, and I thought, “I know my technicians, and there’s no way these guys will ever participate in a business that works like this!” How wrong I was.

Change and Failure

So what’s at the root of this concern? Look at successful and unsuccessful change anywhere, in anything. What makes change stick? How common is change? How often do people change and why do they do it? The most common personal experience around change usually has to do with some habit or behavior, like trying to quit smoking or altering your diet. Why do both come with an incredibly high failure rate?

Look at changes in your business, specifically a failed attempt to implement a different way of working. In response, managers say, “We used to do it that way, but we just don’t anymore,” or “We had a good start and some excitement, but it faded after a few weeks.”

If you examine all these personal and business failures closely, the common element you’ll find is that both the scale of these projects and their timeframes were unreasonable or inappropriate. They were changes we were just not used to or prepared for. For example, successful diets require a lifelong change in eating. Who really thinks that through before starting and is prepared to stick to it forever? It just sounds completely unreasonable. Might there be a more sustainable approach?

What about changes that do stick? Are there factors here that might create understanding? How about a change in your leisure activity? Think about a vacation you took to a new place you never thought you would enjoy, but now you’ve been back there several times. Or how about a new hobby or sport you were accidentally exposed to and wound up loving? These sometimes lead to major lifestyle changes (and usually major investments as well), but they’re very enjoyable changes that we fall into with pleasantly surprising outcomes.

But we’re talking about work here, which often requires more difficult changes. What drives success here? It’s a difficult question to answer. But ultimately, when people understand the value in a change, they accept it, so perhaps the more appropriate question is, “What teaches the value of a new way?” If you approached change from that standpoint, maybe you would have a better chance of making change work.

The fact is that the value of doing work in a new way, or doing anything in a new way, can only be realized when it’s experienced. While learning about “what the change can do” has merit, like jumping out of an airplane, you’ll only begin to “know what that means” after you’ve been there. Therefore, the key to successful change lies in “learning its value by doing it.”

The Manager Killed It

Successful change always requires a period of “doing” in the new way, so that the value can be exposed and support the purpose of the change. The lesson learned, the reflection after the doing, becomes the thing that increase sthe odds of the new way “sticking.” It’s do-learn-do-learn.

With that knowledge, what is it then that causes people to stop “doing” after awhile? Is it from not exposing the value of the new way while people are doing it? Is it from not reflecting on what was learned after we’ve done it for a while? If you have good employees who no longer do work the way you asked them to, is it really because they just stopped on their own? Or is it because their employer failed to expose them to the value? From my experience, in every case, failed change is a result of failed management, not people’s desire, aptitude or ability to change. It’s the manager who killed it. Why is this the case?

Start with the project of creating a kaizen body shop. A kaizen shop is one that’s in constant motion, making constant, daily change of process for the sake of improvement. How do you manage that on a day-by-day basis?

First, it’s a completely different model with the specific function of improving constantly. It recognizes that only process (whether you know you have one or not… you do, it just may not be a very good or sustainable one) delivers results. It uses a process for the purpose of identifying problems, which appear as defects or “out of standard conditions.” To see these defects, you need to pay extreme attention to consistency. You need to do it exactly the same way every time so that how “the way” delivers outcomes can be examined and modified, thereby improving the outcomes. Put another way, you need to watch the engine run closely so that you can see the problems with the engine.

Traditional Versus Kaizen

But how do most managers manage body shops today, and can these same people manage this kaizen business? Let’s start by looking at how we manage people. Today, many shops manage their people with income, or lack of, through consequences associated with either how much work they produce (flat rate) or, in the office, how much gross profit they keep (bonus pay). When your pay is driven by “make lots of work” or “make lots of gross,” it’s very difficult to maintain extreme consistency.

Next, traditional body shop management focuses on removing problems (defects) from the system through expediting around trouble (firefighting). It has both incentivized people to “go like hell” and also focus their activities on supporting clearing the path for maximum production. Good managers in this system spend lots of time making sure problems don’t happen or at least don’t affect production. But the kaizen business intentionally puts these problems directly in people’s paths so they can recognize where the problems came from and how they can be eliminated forever through a process change. These problems are seen as precursors to improvement and are celebrated, not managed around.

In a kaizen shop, the daily “beating your head against the wall” to “make work” ends. Call it a surrender, but it understands that this traditional way of working is 1) too dependent on needing specific people talents to be successful, 2) only profitable when many factors come together correctly and 3) just not worth doing any more. It knows that the head must no longer be used as a hammer but rather to think through the problem with accuracy. It knows that there’s always a better way to do everything and that those who discover it always win.

A kaizen shop manager needs 1) a consistently executed process so that its defects appear and can be understood, 2) people whose incentives are aligned with being consistent and 3) problems that are allowed to surface at their source, stop in their tracks and get highlighted for all to understand their cause.

It’s management that sets the stage for successful change, and that starts with understanding what “management” means in a kaizen business. Clearly it’s very different. What we know is that people will do what you ask them, and continue to do it when they see the value. It’s not them that blow it…it’s their leadership. Leading successful change in the kaizen shop begins with asking them to do the right things. Employees in a kaizen business will have little or no problem making the changes you ask…as long as they’re safe. It’s the leader who’s typically unwilling. Funny, it sounds like cannibalism, but it’s the truth.

So what’s the right thing to ask for? It’s simple, really. You’re in the improvement business now, so you need to ask your employees to do their part in improving by executing a consistent standard way of working. They need to act as “testers” of the way (the process) so the results of the test can be used to change it. The value will be seen when the business results begin to improve. This is where you begin to gain traction. It further improves when your people realize that they’ve become the creators of these new ways. At that point, they not only see the value but they find the work to be rewarding and fun. (continues on next page)