Incremental Change/Feedback LO12442

John Zavacki (jzavacki@wolff.com)
Sun, 9 Feb 1997 09:47:38 -0500

Replying to LO12411 --

I'm another person in agreement with Peters on the topic of incremental
change as an enemy of innovation. It is not the actions of
incrementalism, but the common interpretation of its philosophy which is
incompatible and even downright detrimental to the emerging agility of an
organization or an enterprise.

The notion of incrementalism was popularized by Imai in his Kaizen book.
It compared the economic gains of innovation to those of incrementalism
and showed the "small but many bites" theory of improvement as a way of
life in a team based corporate culture and the innovation theory as a
function of professionals and managers. Fortunately for me, I reread Joe
Juran's "Managerial Breakthrough" to compare it to Kaizen and came to the
conclusion that they are not in conflict. The learning of the tools and
techniques for kaizen apply equally well to the so-called "kaizen event"
which is an attempt at innovation/breakthrough. It is a technique used
effectively by many of the General Electric manufacturing and distribution
divisions to get to and manage a change quickly. You can find reference
to it on the GE webs.

Underlying the agile, learning organization are the tools and methods of
incremenetal, continuous improvement. They are a part of the
organizational operating system. Innovation can thrive in such an
organization by simply shifting the focus of a team. Incrementalism
doesn't say not to innovate, doesn't mean you can't innovate. The tools
sets are close to identical.

John Zavacki
Wolff Group, Inc.
http://www.wolff.com
jzavacki@wolff.com

-- 

"John Zavacki" <jzavacki@wolff.com>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>