What is kaizen? Meaning, principles, kaizen events and the step to automation.

Most teams know their work could run smoother. The same approval waits in someone’s inbox every week, the same figures get copied from one tool into another, the same mistake gets fixed by hand again. Nobody has time for a big transformation project, so nothing changes.

Kaizen is the answer to exactly that situation. Instead of one large overhaul, everyone makes small improvements, every week, and keeps the ones that work. This guide explains what kaizen means, where it comes from, how the process and a kaizen event work, and how it relates to Lean management. It ends where most explanations stop: what to do with the improvements that repeat. Our view at Viralistic is simple. Improve the process by hand first, make it a standard, and only then automate what is left. That order is how we work as automation specialists, and it comes straight from Toyota.

What does kaizen mean?

Kaizen (改善) is an ordinary Japanese word for improvement. It combines kai, change, and zen, good, so it is usually translated as “change for the better”. In business, kaizen means continuous improvement: small, ongoing changes to processes, made by everyone from the shop floor to the boardroom, that add up to large gains in quality, speed and cost.

Two things set kaizen apart from a regular improvement project. First, it is never finished. There is no end date, only the next small step. Second, it belongs to everyone. The people who do the work every day see the friction first, so they are the ones expected to suggest and test the fix. Managers support, remove obstacles and make sure good changes stick.

Where the idea comes from: Toyota and Masaaki Imai

Kaizen took shape in post-war Japan and became a daily habit at Toyota. Toyota officially started its employee suggestion programme in 1951, and according to Toyota’s own 1973 report on the programme it attracted 789 ideas in its first year. In fiscal 1972 employees submitted 168,000 suggestions, with 76% adopted, under the motto “Good thinking, good products”. Today Toyota describes the Toyota Production System as a system in which all employees implement daily incremental kaizen.

The West learned the word from Masaaki Imai. He founded the Kaizen Institute in 1985 and published Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success in 1986, followed by Gemba Kaizen in 1997, according to the Kaizen Institute’s history of the method. Imai worked with Taiichi Ohno, the engineer who built the Toyota Production System, and spent the rest of his career teaching the approach worldwide. In The Toyota Way 2001, Toyota named continuous improvement and respect for people as the two pillars of how it works. For the bigger picture of Jidoka, Just-in-Time and the assembly line, read our guide to the Toyota Production System.

The core principles of continuous improvement

Kaizen rests on a handful of principles. Sources number them differently (five, ten, sometimes more), but they all come back to the same ideas:

1. Everyone improves. Improvement is part of every job, not the task of a separate department.
2. Small steps, often. Many cheap changes beat one expensive programme, because they are easy to test and easy to reverse.
3. Go and see. Look at the real work in the gemba, the place where value is created, instead of judging from a report.
4. Fix the process, not the person. When something goes wrong, ask what in the process allowed it, not who is to blame.
5. Standardise what works. A change only counts once it is the new standard way of working.
6. Start from the customer. Every step is judged by the value it adds for the next person in line, internal or external.

German-language sources often frame the same ideas as five orientations: towards the customer, the process, quality, critique and standardisation. The labels differ. The behaviour is the same.

How the process works: PDCA and the standard

The kaizen process runs on the PDCA cycle: Plan, Do, Check, Act. You plan a small change to a problem you have seen, try it on a small scale, check the result against what you expected and, if it worked, act by making it the standard. Then the cycle starts again on the next problem. Our guide to the PDCA cycle covers each step in detail.

The step most teams skip is the standard. Taiichi Ohno put it bluntly: “There can be no kaizen without a standard.” The Lean Enterprise Institute explains why. Without a stable, written way of working, teams improve on top of chaos and the gains vanish within weeks. With a standard, every improvement has a baseline to beat and a place to be recorded. Some practitioners call this the SDCA cycle (Standardise, Do, Check, Act), the loop that holds a gain in place before the next PDCA round.

Keep that idea in mind. It returns later, because the standard is also the point where a process becomes ready to automate.

Daily kaizen or a kaizen event?

Kaizen comes in two forms. Daily kaizen is the habit: a team spends a few minutes a day or week on one small improvement. A kaizen event, also called a kaizen blitz or kaizen workshop, is a focused sprint in which a cross-functional team takes on one bounded problem full-time, usually for three to five days.

A typical kaizen event follows the same rhythm: learn the principle, go to the gemba to see the current state, change the process and test it, then standardise and report the result to management. The Lean Enterprise Institute notes that events commonly last five days and lists the classic ways they fail: counting the number of events instead of real results, losing the gains once people return to their old routine, and leaving the people who do the work out of it.

The strongest organisations do both. Events deliver a visible jump and teach people how to improve. Daily kaizen keeps the gains and finds the next hundred small fixes that no event would ever touch.

How does it relate to Lean, Six Sigma and kaikaku?

Kaizen is the improvement engine inside Lean. Lean management is the wider system: define value for the customer, map the value stream, create flow and pull, and strive for perfection. Kaizen is how that last principle happens in practice, one small change at a time. Lean is a Western name, given in the late twentieth century to what Toyota called its production system.

Six Sigma, developed at Motorola in the 1980s, is a separate method that uses statistics to reduce variation. Lean Six Sigma combines it with Lean, and many teams use kaizen events inside its Improve phase. Kaikaku is the opposite end of the scale: a radical change in one go. The two work together. After a kaikaku, kaizen refines the new situation step by step.

What continuous improvement looks like in an office team

Kaizen works in an office for the same reason it works in a factory: the waste is the same, only harder to see. Factory waste piles up as inventory on the floor. Office waste hides in inboxes, spreadsheets and chat threads. Our guide to the 8 wastes of Lean lists them all; in office and digital work they usually look like this:

• Waiting: a quote that sits for two days until one manager approves it.
• Transport: copying customer data from a form into the CRM and again into the invoicing tool.
• Overprocessing: a weekly report of twenty pages that people read one figure from.
• Defects: an invoice with the wrong VAT rate, corrected by hand after a customer complains.
• Motion: searching three shared drives for the latest version of a contract.
• Unused talent: the colleague who knows exactly how to fix the process but is never asked.

Here is what kaizen looks like in practice, as an example. A small sales team spends fifteen minutes every Monday at a shared board, physical or in Notion. Each person adds one friction from last week. The team picks one, agrees on a small change and an owner, and checks the effect the following Monday. Week one: a fixed template for quotes. Week two: one shared folder with a naming rule. Week three: a required field in the intake form, so the budget is never missing again. None of these changes needs a budget or a project plan. After a quarter the team has a dozen of them, each written into the way of working.

5S, the workplace organisation method often paired with kaizen, has a digital version too: sort (delete what nobody uses), set in order (one place and one naming rule per document type), shine (clean up broken links and duplicate records), standardise (write the rule down) and sustain (check it in the weekly meeting).

Kaizen and automation: fix by hand, then automate what repeats

Automation is the natural next step of kaizen, as long as it comes after the improvement, not instead of it. Toyota says this in so many words in its explanation of jidoka, which it loosely translates as “automation with a human touch”. Rather than starting with a machine, Toyota writes, you must first do the work thoroughly by hand, implement kaizen, remove waste and make the work possible for anyone, and only then build it into the machine. The same page adds that machines, robots and IT cannot evolve on their own: only people implement kaizen. You can read it on Toyota’s page on the production system.

Toyota’s own employees made the link decades ago. In the 1973 report on the suggestion programme, 70% of suggestions were about eliminating or simplifying production processes or introducing automation, and 7% were about simplifying business operations and internal forms. Automation was never the enemy of kaizen. It was one of its most common outcomes.

That is the order we work in at Viralistic: fix, standardise, automate. Never automate a broken process. Automating waste only produces waste faster, and now at the speed of a server. So before anyone builds an n8n workflow, we map the process with the people who do the work, mark the waits, the double entry and the rework, and remove what should not be there. What remains is a clear, written standard. Only then do we automate the steps that repeat, with n8n, Claude and Notion, error handling and a named owner for every workflow.

When is an improvement ready to automate?

A step is a good candidate when all of these are true:

• It is standardised. Everyone does it the same way and the steps are written down.
• It repeats. It happens daily or weekly, not twice a year.
• It is bounded. It has a clear trigger and a clear end result.
• It follows rules, or a narrow judgement. Fixed rules go into deterministic workflow steps. A narrow judgement, such as classifying an incoming email, can go to an AI step with a structured output.
• A mistake is easy to spot and fix. Start with low-risk work, keep a person in the loop for anything that leaves the company.

This mirrors the method in our guide on how to turn a business process into an agentic workflow: pick a frequent, bounded process, map it, keep as much as possible deterministic and roll out in stages, from shadow mode to assisted to automated. Each stage is itself a PDCA loop. And once a workflow runs, kaizen continues on the workflow: the error log shows the next small improvement, just as the andon light does on Toyota’s line.

Is kaizen outdated? Limits and common mistakes

Kaizen is not outdated, but it is often done badly. Toyota still describes daily, incremental kaizen by all employees as part of its production system, and the principles apply directly to digital work and AI agents. What fails is the implementation. These are the mistakes we see most:

• No standard. Changes are tested but never written down, so the team slides back to the old way within a month.
• Only events. A yearly kaizen blitz without a daily habit leaves most of the workforce out of it.
• Ideas without follow-up. Suggestions disappear into a spreadsheet, and people quietly stop making them.
• Blame instead of process. If reporting a problem earns a reprimand, problems stop being reported.
• Using gains to cut people. When saved time turns into lost jobs, nobody suggests the next improvement. Spend the time on better work, more customer contact or the next fix.
• Expecting breakthroughs. Kaizen is slow by design. When the process itself is wrong, you need a redesign (kaikaku) first.

How to start this month

Start small and keep a fixed rhythm. A first month of kaizen in an office team can look like this:

1. Pick one process that people feel every week, such as quotes, onboarding or invoicing.
2. Walk through it with the people who do it, and write down every step, wait and handover.
3. Write down the current standard, even if it is messy. You need a baseline.
4. Hold a short weekly kaizen moment: fifteen minutes, one friction, one owner, one small change.
5. Check the following week. Keep what works as the new standard, reverse what does not.
6. Keep a list of steps that repeat unchanged. Those are your automation candidates.
7. Automate one of them once it has been stable for a few weeks, and keep improving it.

Marrallisa Kreijkes, founder of Viralistic in Amsterdam and an official n8n Ambassador, teaches exactly this bridge between process and automation. She taught the DataCamp webinar How to turn a business process into an agentic workflow, trained Volkswagen Pon Financial Services on getting found in AI, spoke on the main stage of n8n’s conference In The Loop in Berlin in October 2026, gave a lecture at Anthropic, the company behind Claude, and ran an n8n workshop at Maastricht University with the student associations MAIN and TCM. DataCamp, Volkswagen Pon, n8n and Anthropic brought her in to teach. When you work with Viralistic, you work with that same person, directly. Read more about her talks and trainings.

Kaizen is a way of working in which everyone improves the process a little, every week, and writes down what works. Do that consistently and the repeatable work becomes visible on its own. If you want help mapping a process, removing the waste and automating what is left, talk to an automation specialist at Viralistic, or read our pillar guide on Lean management first.

Frequently asked questions

What are the 5 principles of kaizen?

The five principles most often listed are: involve everyone, improve in small steps, go to the gemba to see the real work, fix the process rather than blame people, and standardise what works. German sources frame them as customer, process, quality, critique and standardisation orientation. Different labels, same behaviour: small, shared, documented improvement.

What are the 10 rules of kaizen?

There is no single official list. The version shared most often includes: drop fixed ideas, think how it can be done, accept no excuses, do it now even if only half right, correct mistakes at once, use wisdom before money, ask why five times, seek ideas from many people and accept that improvement never ends.

Is kaizen a Six Sigma tool?

No. Kaizen comes from Japanese management and the Toyota Production System, while Six Sigma was developed at Motorola in the 1980s to reduce variation with statistics. They work well together: Lean Six Sigma projects often run a kaizen event in the Improve phase of DMAIC, and daily kaizen keeps the gains afterwards.

What is 5S in kaizen?

5S is a workplace organisation method often used alongside kaizen: sort, set in order, shine, standardise and sustain. It removes searching and clutter so problems become visible. In digital work 5S means deleting unused files, one folder and naming rule per document type, cleaning duplicate records and checking the rule weekly.

What are the disadvantages of kaizen?

Kaizen is slow by design, so it will not fix a process that is wrong at its core. It also needs steady leadership attention, time in the week and a culture where problems can be raised without blame. Without written standards and follow-up, gains fade within weeks and people stop suggesting improvements.

How long does a kaizen event last?

A kaizen event usually lasts three to five days, and the Lean Enterprise Institute notes five days is common. Shorter versions of one or two days work for office processes. The event ends with a new standard and a report to management, followed by daily kaizen to hold the gains.

Can you use kaizen in your personal life?

Yes. Personal kaizen applies the same idea to habits: one small, repeatable improvement instead of a big resolution, such as ten minutes of practice a day or clearing your desk every evening. The Kaizen Institute, founded by Masaaki Imai, defines kaizen as improvement in personal, home, social and working life.

Will AI and automation replace kaizen?

No. Automation is one of the outcomes of kaizen, not a replacement. Toyota states that machines and IT cannot improve themselves; only people implement kaizen. AI and n8n workflows take over the repeatable steps once a process is standardised, and the team keeps improving the process and the workflow.

What does KVP stand for?

KVP is the German term kontinuierlicher Verbesserungsprozess, the continuous improvement process. German companies adopted kaizen under this name from the early 1990s, often as part of quality management. In daily use KVP and kaizen mean the same thing: small, ongoing improvements by everyone, usually run through the PDCA cycle.