One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

Small Questions for Others
Once, I trooped out to a middle school in Los Angeles with a group of medical residents who were
training to become family physicians. It’s a truism in family medicine that adolescents hate going to the
doctor, and until this point we’d all been resigned to dealing with teens who were sullen or
uncommunicative. This was especially frustrating for doctors who wanted to talk to kids about important
health matters like drug use, sex, and smoking, but felt their young patients weren’t focused on the
discussion. 
But that’s teenagers for you,
we all thought, 
nothing you can do about it.
Then I realized that
no one had even asked these kids how to make office visits less of an ordeal.
So we went to a setting that was more familiar to them than to us—their own classrooms. We asked
students what they liked and didn’t like about going to the doctor. One teenager raised her hand and said
that when she went to the doctor, she spent the whole visit worrying about the treatment she was going to
receive there, whether a booster shot for tetanus or something equally unpleasant. She suggested that
doctors perform these procedures at the beginning of the visit so that their patients could focus on the
doctor’s questions and advice later. When the kids around her began to nod in agreement, we decided to
implement this suggestion (it’s worked beautifully). The resident physicians were all a little surprised and
humbled when other students said that they preferred to have their parents with them in the office. The
residents had assumed that teenagers found their parents embarrassing and would see their young doctor
as a cool adult alternative. In another twist that reveals the ever-contradictory nature of adolescents,
another student wanted doctors to give out their phone numbers directly to the teenagers so that they could
call with a personal question without going through their parents.
Each of the medical residents in the group was unquestionably committed to helping adolescents
become healthy, thriving adults. But very few of them saw members of this age group outside of a medical
context. Their willingness to meet with them at school and ask them small questions is reflective of an
ingredient basic to kaizen: respect for others, even those whose attitudes and answers we think we
already understand.
You can use kaizen questions in a similar way. I know one school principal who regularly asks her
secretary to inform her whenever someone leaves her office looking disgruntled or unhappy. This highly
respected principal knows that many people—students and their parents alike—can feel vulnerable when
they’re sent “to the office” and don’t always disclose their feelings until they’re on the way out. By
making her secretary a part of her team, the principal can provide more sensitive follow-up for these
children and adults. Many successful bosses like to ask their receptionist or assistant this small question:
Is there one small improvement that the staff/customers/clients would like me to make?
(To make sure
this question is answered honestly, it’s important to reward honest feedback immediately and 
always
practice discretion.) I even know a lawyer who regularly assembles the janitorial staff to listen to his trial
summations and offer suggestions.
Questioning others may also help when you have trouble pinpointing your own needs. One woman I
know was dissatisfied with her marriage. But when I asked her what she wanted from her husband, she
looked at me blankly. This woman had raised two children who were now in college, nursed her parents

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through their final years, and supported her husband in his career. She had accomplished a great deal, but
she had focused on what her children and her husband and her parents had wanted for so long that she had
cut herself out of the loop. She was angry about the way her husband treated her, but she could hardly
describe the manner in which she would 
like
to be treated. So she asked her happily married friends this
question: 
What is one thing your husband does that makes you happy?
From their answers, she created
a menu of marital options, and eventually she was able to answer the question for herself.
I’ve run into many people who are unhappy in their current careers but cannot think of anything else
they’d like to do. Most of these people have been trained to think of a job as a way to earn money—and
that’s all. Their brains have never been programmed to answer the question 
What kind of job could bring
me pride and pleasure?
In this case, I suggest finding friends who enjoy their jobs and asking: 
What is
one aspect of your job that makes you happy?
The answers can stimulate thought about the sources of
pleasure at work.
I 
HOPE
YOU
’
LL
BUILD
THE
KAIZEN
HABIT
of asking yourself small (and positive!) questions. As you begin,
remember that you are programming your brain for creativity, so choose a question and ask it repeatedly,
over the course of several days or weeks. Instead of freezing up your brain with tall orders and angry
demands, you’ll experience the productive output of a brain that is pleasantly challenged. If your goal is to
come up with a creative breakthrough or a single idea for improvement, you may be done when you
receive your answer. But if you are trying to achieve a difficult or frightening goal, a small question may
be just one step toward change. The rest of this book will suggest many more strategies—safe and
nonthreatening—for realizing your dreams.