Knowledge Base · Foundations
What are the "Big Three" simple tools to start continuous improvement?
The Big Three in Chapter 1 are Kaizen, Lean and Six Sigma. Kaizen is small improvements, made continuously by everyone. Lean strips out waste: work that consumes resources while giving the customer nothing back. Six Sigma uses data to cut variation and defects, aiming for fewer than 3.4 defects per million opportunities.
Chapter 1 pictures Kaizen, Lean and Six Sigma as legs supporting a stool, each one a practical and straightforward route into improvement work. The names sound technical. In the book they are presented as aids for doing ordinary work more deliberately and well, not as systems that belong only to engineers carrying clipboards and stopwatches.
- Kaizen: small improvements, made continuously. Everybody watches for everyday problems and puts them right, with ideas surfacing in a morning huddle, coming through a suggestion box that somebody actually reads, or amounting to a minor change in how a customer call is handled.
- Lean: cutting out waste. Waste means any activity that takes time, money or effort without giving the end customer anything in return, including defects, waiting, unused talent and extra processing.
- Six Sigma: consistency and quality. It uses data to cut defects and variation, leaving a process predictable and dependable, with mistakes becoming very rare.
Used together, the three cover the main questions of improvement. Kaizen asks what small thing we can improve today. Lean asks what we can stop doing because it adds no value. Six Sigma asks what is causing variation, and how we control it so a good result happens every time, not just on a good day.
Related questions
Source: Continuous Improvement in the Workplace, Ch. 1 (Understanding Continuous Improvement).