What Is The Kaizen Method And How Can It Help With A Goal?

In Japanese companies like Toyota and Panasonic, the practice of kaizen underlies how employees operate. Kaizen is the concept of continually improving in small increments, even as small as 1%. Could this practice also be adopted in our personal lives for specific goals we want to achieve?

Experts believe it can. Even though therapists may not refer to it with the same name, incremental behavior change “is a behavioral strategy that many mental health practitioners use regularly to help clients make the behavior changes they want and develop new habits,” said Jolie Silva, a clinical psychologist and chief operating officer of New York Behavioral Health. “You are more likely to reach long term, big goals if you take small steps toward them.”

Even as small as a 1% improvement counts? Truly?

“I do not believe there’s any real data on what 1% even means. So I think people might have different ideas about what 1% means,” Silva said.

Nevertheless, breaking big goals or tasks into bite-sized chunks is especially “recommended in the scientific literature for people that have ‘task paralysis,’ a hard time initiating tasks, a hard time with motivation,” she added.

And as long as the “1% improvement” leaves you with a sense of accomplishment afterward, that’s the thing to pay attention to here, Silva noted. This is what is “going to propel you to do it again the next day,” she said.

Breaking your larger goal into small goals means you are giving yourself more opportunities to experience these small wins and foster your self-efficacy.

“We get this little bit of satisfaction and reward,” said Katherine Milkman, behavioral change researcher and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

And if you get the opportunity to feel this sense of accomplishment on a daily basis, instead of only getting it at the end when the larger goal is reached, it helps motivate you to keep moving forward toward the larger goal, Silva said.

Giving yourself permission to make a small improvement each day, without rushing the process just to get to the end point, can also help stave off task paralysis.

“In general, a big goal is overwhelming. When we break something big down, it feels less overwhelming. We can do it little by little, and instead of feeling like it’s this daunting thing that we can’t take on,” Milkman said.

If you’re looking to try this goal-setting method, experts offered their advice for getting started:

“You don’t want to be saying, ‘I’m changing 1% in these 20 areas.’ It’s recommended to start in one area with one goal and one behavior,” Silva said. “After doing it for a while and you start to see progress, you could add another goal if you want to. But don’t start with too many.”

“Visualize what the end game looks like,” Silva said.

In as much detail as possible, picture what your life looks like after you’ve achieved that end goal. Where are you? What are you doing? Who is around? What are the emotions you’re feeling? What are the beliefs you have? How does your body feel?

Doing this “can incentivize and excite people to start thinking about how they are going to get there,” Silva said.

Jot this vision down somewhere you can see or that you can easily refer back to.

Adopting the kaizen principle doesn’t mean just telling yourself each day that “I’m going to be better,” Milkman said. How would you measure being better? How would you know whether you did accomplish that small goal?

You want to make these small daily goals or improvements concrete and measurable, Milkman noted. Specify exactly what you will do, where you will do it and what time you will do it. Doing this is “important for increasing follow-through” on your intention, Milkman said.

It might be helpful to write these all down at the beginning of each week so you know exactly what you’re aiming for each day. And keep track of what you’re doing in a journal or on a whiteboard “so that you can see your progress rather than it being abstract,” Silva said.

If you view these continual 1% improvements as tiny goals, a failure to meet a goal can lead to the “what-the-hell” effect, Milkman cautioned. This is where a person abandons their goals because they feel like they’ve slipped up. In other words: “‘What the hell, I might as well do whatever I please,’” Milkman said.

A growth mindset helps counter the what-the-hell effect, she noted. Instead of believing that you have a fixed set of capabilities — and that every time you have a misstep or failure it is diagnostic of your ability and how strong you are at that skill and as a person — a growth mindset believes that your capabilities are not fixed and you can always grow and get better.

“Anytime you have a misstep, instead of saying that this is diagnostic of my ability, you say, ‘This is information that is useful. I’m going to use it to learn and grow and not have a misstep again. What went wrong? How will I avoid the same fate tomorrow?’” Milkman said.

Another technique for combating the what-the-hell effect is giving yourself “emergency reserves,” which comes from research by Marissa Sharif, an associate professor of marketing at Wharton School whose research examines consumer motivation and judgment and decision-making.

For example, if you’re aiming to accomplish a small goal every day, allow yourself two get-out-of-jail-free cards, Milkman said.

If you miss a day or two of meeting your daily goals, it’s not counted as a failure, but using one of your emergency reserves, Milkman explained. Then, you start fresh the next day.