Kaizen is the Japanese principle of continuous improvement through small steps. Rather than waiting for large-scale restructuring, the team improves its work process daily through small, immediately actionable adjustments. The effect unfolds over time: many small improvements add up to a fundamentally better system.
In practice, Kaizen often starts in the Retrospective. A team notices that meetings are frequently rescheduled because invitations are sent too late. The measure: send invitations one day earlier going forward. This sounds trivial, but that is precisely the core of Kaizen. It is not about spectacular changes but about the mindset of improving one small thing every day. Teams that live Kaizen maintain an improvement board where ideas are collected, prioritized, and marked as done after implementation. This makes visible that things are actually moving.
Kaizen originates from the Toyota Production System and became internationally known through Masaaki Imai’s 1986 book of the same name. It is not a tool but a way of thinking that is anchored as one of the foundational pillars of Kanban.
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