Kaizen is Japanese for “change for the better” and denotes continuous improvement in small steps, driven by the employees who work in the process. Its opposite is large, rare improvement projects driven from the outside.
Kaizen’s strength is not the individual improvement but the frequency: hundreds of small improvements a year beat one big project, because they anchor in habits and ownership. The prerequisite is a system that captures, prioritises and executes suggestions visibly — otherwise the initiative dies once the first suggestions gather dust.
A kaizen event (kaizen blitz) is a concentrated variant: a team solves one bounded problem in 3-5 days with full focus.