Kaizen is the Japanese art of constant improvement. Kaizen was adopted widely by the US military and then the Japanese manufacturing sector. Toyota revolutionised it’s manufacturing process through Kaizen.
Whilst marginal gain is certainly in the same area as Kaizen there are some significant differences. The 2 however work perfectly together.
Kaizen is about making small changes regularly and consistently, and allowing time to see the results.
Many people want to make a change to themselves or their organisation but never see the results because it is either too scary to start, or they do not give the changes long enough to show results.
Medical evidence will show that your brain can react badly to the very thought of change. Fear is natural and is one of the automatic reactions to change. As an aside many people regularly mis-label fear as stress.
One way to trick your brain into not making that scary reaction is to make the change so small that at first glance it appears insignificant. Over a significant amount of time, however, the change can be staggering. The positive being the changes are small, the negative can be the timescale to see any significant result. The failure to allow the time to show the results is often a mistake made often by many people and organisations.
As an example, the global weight management industry, valued at over 200 bn USD in 2018, is an excellent story.
Kaizen, an ancient philosophy, could be the most powerful weight management strategy and unfortunately for the WM industry it is free!! However what it does require are consistent small changes over time…and this is fashionably unpopular, to the tune of 200 billion USD.