One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

CHAPTER TWO
Ask Small Questions
Small questions create a mental environment that welcomes unabashed creativity and playfulness.
When you ask small questions of others, you channel that creative force toward team goals. By
asking small questions of yourself, you lay the groundwork for a personalized program for change.
One of the most powerful ways to “program” your brain is the kaizen technique of asking small questions.
I first put this idea into practice when I was hired by a manufacturing firm to help its managers improve
some groups that were performing poorly. I watched as the supervisor of one of these groups—let’s call
him Patrick—ran a meeting. Patrick paced frenetically back and forth in front of his employees, asking in
a loud, rapid-fire voice, “What is each of you going to do to make our company the best in the industry?”
This questioning had become a frequent ritual for Patrick at both formal meetings and more casual
gatherings.
Patrick hoped to instill a sense of responsibility and pride in his staff. He thought he was empowering
them to create bold new products and services as well as major cost savings. Instead, the employees froze
up. They were visibly uncomfortable, gazing down at the floor and fidgeting in their chairs. I noticed that
one man’s hands actually began to tremble; whether out of fright or anger I didn’t know. Later, I heard
employees complaining plaintively among themselves: 
What does Patrick expect of us? Why do we have
to come up with new ideas? That’s his job! We have enough to do as it is!
The few suggestions Patrick
did receive—hire more employees to help us get our jobs done, buy new equipment to replace our
outdated machines—called for expensive, impractical actions and were actually complaints in disguise.
In the three months following Patrick’s first urgent call for improvement, the number of sick days taken by
employees increased by 23 percent.
I told Patrick that I agreed with his basic strategy of going to his employees as a source of fresh ideas.
In Japanese business circles, a basic tenet for using kaizen is to encourage each employee to stay vigilant
on behalf of the corporation, an approach that yields profitable cost-cutting ideas and a highly engaged,
productive workforce. However, the kaizen method works not by manic exhortation to revolutionize the
company, but by requests that are much simpler and restricted in scope. I suggested to Patrick that he
soften his tone and alter his phrasing. In his next meeting, Patrick used a calmer voice and asked each
employee: “Can you think of a very small step you might take to improve our process or product?” To his
surprise, faces around the room tilted toward him; as his employees began to mull over this slightly
different question, they began to sit up straighter and contribute to the discussion.
Both the quality and quantity of responses improved dramatically. One employee spoke up right away.
He’d noticed that scrap metal left over from jobs in the machine shop was discarded at the end of the day
and wondered if the company might find a buyer for it instead. (The company did indeed start to sell the
scrap metal.) Another man realized that most of the mistakes involving machine tools were made by new
employees within six months of their hire date. He volunteered to spend two hours training each new
employee in an attempt to save time and money. (The training accomplished both.) A third suggestion was

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to have employees spend the first five minutes of the monthly staff meeting publicly thanking those who’d
been extremely helpful to them. This idea was executed immediately and was so popular that it spread to
the shop floor, where employees began to compliment each other on the spot instead of waiting for the
meeting. Soon enough, both morale and efficiency increased. Employees not only had the satisfaction of
implementing their own suggestions and improving their daily routines, but they also felt the universal
pleasure of being engaged and active at work. And the number of sick days went back down to its normal
level.
What had happened?