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Most Lean practitioners treat kaizen events as the engine of continuous improvement. The standard pattern is to launch a Lean program with a series of rapid improvement events, build momentum, and let the broader culture of improvement grow from there.
Albanesa Ymaya argues this sequence is usually backward.
Her case: kaizen events optimize processes. They don't transform them. An organization that begins its Lean journey with kaizen events often spends years polishing systems that needed to be redesigned rather than refined. The momentum that the standard sequence is supposed to build never quite arrives, because the changes are too small to register and the underlying systemic problems persist.
The alternative she advocates is to lead with kaikaku -- radical, system-level transformation -- and then sustain the gains with kaizen events afterward. Kaikaku creates the breakthrough. Kaizen sustains it. The sequence matters because momentum builds when people see significant change, not incremental polish.
This webinar walks through the case in detail. Albanesa introduces the four types of kaizen, distinguishes kaikaku from kaizen events across multiple dimensions, makes the specific argument for sequencing them deliberately, and closes with a practical formula that combines kaikaku, kaizen events, kaizen teian, and (when appropriate) kakushin into what she calls a real Lean transformation.
Albanesa Ymaya is Founder, President, and CEO of Ymaya Lean Academy Inc. and a Lean transformation consultant based in the Dominican Republic. She brings more than 17 years of experience leading Lean transformations across manufacturing, medical devices, electronics, and service organizations in Latin America, the United States, and Europe.
The session is hosted by Mark Graban, then VP of Improvement and Innovation Services at KaiNexus and the author of Lean Hospitals, Healthcare Kaizen, and The Mistakes That Make Us.
Before getting to the sequencing argument, Albanesa walks through the four distinct types of kaizen that operate at different scales. Most Lean practitioners know one or two of these well. The full set matters because they're not interchangeable -- they solve different problems and produce different kinds of impact.
Kaizen teian is people-driven suggestion. Individual employees identify opportunities within their own work, propose changes, and often implement them themselves. The aim is to build an autonomous improvement culture by giving frontline workers the empowerment and tools to act on what they see. Kaizen teian produces high volume and low individual impact -- many small changes, each individually modest, accumulating to substantial collective value.
Kaizen events (also called kaizen blitz or rapid improvement events) are structured, time-boxed efforts where a multifunctional team focuses on improving one specific process. Typically three to five days of concentrated work. The team uses one or two Lean tools (5S, TPM, line balancing, value-add/non-value-add analysis) to address a defined problem. Kaizen events produce incremental, gradual improvement on a bounded scope.
Kaikaku is radical change. The Japanese term means roughly "to break apart and rebuild." A kaikaku effort redesigns an entire system or process rather than improving a single step. It uses whatever combination of Lean tools, Six Sigma methods, and adjacent disciplines the transformation requires. The scope is broad -- a kaikaku effort affects safety, quality, delivery, cost, and people simultaneously. The timeline is longer (typically 60 to 180 days, sometimes up to a year) and the resource commitment is higher.
Kakushin is innovation. Where kaikaku changes how the work is done, kakushin changes what is done. Switching from a manual process to an automated one might be kaikaku. Switching to a fundamentally different raw material or product approach is kakushin. The distinction matters because innovation work has different dynamics than transformation work, even when both produce large changes.
The four types form a spectrum: from individual to team, from incremental to radical, from optimization to innovation. Most organizations operate primarily in one or two of these modes. Albanesa's argument is that mature improvement programs use all four, deployed deliberately based on the scope of the challenge.
Before the contrast, Albanesa emphasizes what the two approaches share. The common ground is important because it grounds the argument in actual Lean practice rather than positioning kaikaku as a separate discipline.
Both approaches follow a structured methodology -- PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) or DMAIC (Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control). Both require accurate data to evaluate effectiveness. Both depend on multifunctional teams rather than isolated specialists. Both require leadership commitment to operate at all. Both demand employee training in Lean concepts. Both depend on transparency and honesty -- problems that get hidden don't get solved. Both treat employee development as a core expected outcome, not a side effect. Both use people's ideas as the primary source of problem resolution and innovation.
The list of common elements is long enough that the two approaches are genuinely cousins. They share the underlying philosophy, the methodology, and the leadership requirements. The differences are in scope, scale, and what they're designed to produce -- not in fundamental orientation.
The differences fall into several distinct categories.
Impact versus effort. Kaizen events require less effort and produce less impact. Kaikaku requires more effort and produces correspondingly more impact. The relationship is roughly linear. The trade-off isn't whether to invest -- it's how much investment fits the scope of the problem.
The governing commandments. Kaikaku, drawing on principles from Hiroyuki Hirano, includes commandments like "stop thinking about traditional manufacturing concepts" and "use creativity, not capital." Kaizen events have parallel principles: "open your mind to change," "there is no destination on the improvement journey." Albanesa notes that the wording is different but the underlying intent maps closely. Both approaches require willingness to question existing assumptions. Both reject the equation of improvement with capital expenditure.
The "don't spend money" principle is particularly important for kaikaku. The common assumption is that radical transformation requires substantial investment. Albanesa's experience contradicts this. The transformations she has led have typically required modest investment because the constraint is creativity, not capital. Teams that can't redesign a process without buying new equipment usually haven't fully analyzed the existing process.
The structure of execution. Both approaches share roughly the same input requirements -- leadership support, a multifunctional team of 8-10 people, training materials, KPI data, a Lean subject matter expert to guide the work, a dedicated room for the team, food and refreshments to support the team during sustained sessions. What differs is the magnitude.
A kaizen event runs roughly 15-30 days of pre-event planning, followed by a three-to-five-day intensive event (the "kaizen week"), followed by approximately 30 days of action plan completion for items that couldn't be implemented during the event itself.
A kaikaku effort runs roughly 15 days of pre-event planning, a five-day intensive event, and then 60 to 180 days of transformation work. The longer transformation period reflects the broader scope -- redesigning an entire system takes substantially more elapsed time than improving one process.
The expected output. A kaizen event produces an improved single process, more employee engagement, shared best practices, training depth, and some cost reduction or savings as a byproduct. A kaikaku effort produces operational performance gains across multiple dimensions, a stable production environment, improved gross margin, redesigned flow, and what amounts to a compilation of many kaizen-level improvements rolled into a single coordinated transformation.
Leadership willingness. This is the soft variable but possibly the most consequential. Leaders are typically more comfortable starting with kaizen events than with kaikaku. The reasons Albanesa names include lack of understanding of what kaikaku actually involves, fear of doing things radically differently, the (incorrect) belief that kaikaku requires substantial capital, and the intuition that step-by-step improvement is safer than transformation. Her experience runs the other way -- the safer-feeling sequence often produces less safe results, because the underlying systemic problems persist while the program polishes the symptoms.
Albanesa offers a visual framing that captures the impact difference cleanly.
A kaizen event is like picking a single apple from a tree. You receive one benefit from the universe of possibilities present in your process. The benefit is real. It's also bounded by the scope of the event.
A kaikaku is like harvesting the entire orchard. The radical transformation simultaneously affects safety (fewer accidents, ergonomic improvements, accident reduction), quality (fewer discrepancies, fewer customer complaints, reduced material rejects, lower total cost of poor quality), delivery (improved lead time, better flow of both material and information), cost (reduced material variance, lower cost per unit, less overtime, lower inventory levels, less wasted space and energy), and people (improved engagement, better employee education and training, stronger problem-solving culture, deeper organizational learning).
The point isn't that kaikaku is universally better than kaizen events. The point is that the magnitude of impact is different in kind, not just degree. An organization that needs system-level change will not get there through kaizen events alone, regardless of how many they run.
The standard Lean teaching sequence -- start with small changes, build momentum, work up to bigger transformations -- has intuitive appeal. It feels safer. It requires less initial commitment. It produces visible wins quickly.
Albanesa's argument against this sequence is sharp:
Kaizen events on a process that needs transformation produce optimization of broken systems. The team works hard, applies the methodology correctly, and improves the specific problem they were assigned to address. The underlying systemic dysfunction persists. Within months, new variations of the same problem emerge in adjacent parts of the process. The team runs another kaizen event. The cycle repeats. The improvement program produces real activity but limited systemic change.
The visual framing she uses: trying to put out a fire with your bare hands. Kaizen events are the hands. Kaikaku is the proper response when the scope of the problem exceeds what hands can address.
Starting with kaikaku does something the standard sequence can't. It creates momentum -- not the small wins of a successful kaizen event, but the visible, organization-wide signal that real change is possible and that leadership is serious about producing it. Albanesa calls this creating a "continuous improvement showroom." After a successful kaikaku, the organization has tangible proof that improvement isn't theoretical. The skeptics have less ground to stand on. The committed have something to point to. The frontline workers see that their input can produce real change rather than incremental polish.
Then -- and only then -- kaizen events become the right next move. After kaikaku has redesigned the system, kaizen events sustain and optimize the new design. The sequence works because kaikaku creates the conditions where kaizen events produce meaningful improvement rather than cosmetic adjustments to a still-broken system.
The phrase Albanesa returns to: kaikaku gives you transformation. Kaizen sustains the gains.
The session closes with a practical framework that Albanesa has used across multiple Lean transformations. She calls it the 3P-LT formula -- the Three P's of Lean Transformation.
The components: People. Product. Process.
The sequence: Kaikaku first. Then kaizen events. Then kaizen teian. Kakushin where appropriate. All three (or four) operate concurrently in mature programs, but they enter the program in the order that makes them work.
The 3P emphasis matters because Lean transformation isn't only about process. It's also about transforming the people who do the work (developing their problem-solving capability, their engagement, their ownership) and the products themselves (the things customers receive at the end of the process). Programs that optimize process while ignoring people or product produce technically improved systems that fail to capture the full available value.
The before/after Albanesa shows from a real transformation illustrates the formula's results. A process that began with substantial complexity, multiple machine types, significant work-in-progress, and high resource consumption became a substantially simpler, more focused, more flow-oriented operation after the transformation. More with less. Less complexity, less waste, less space, fewer problems, fewer machines -- accompanied by better people development, better process discipline, and better product quality.
The transformation requires leadership commitment, the willingness to believe in the methodology, and the discipline to follow the sequence. None of it works without those conditions in place. With them, the formula produces results that incremental improvement alone cannot.
The platform supports the disciplines Albanesa describes in several ways worth naming.
The capture and tracking infrastructure makes kaizen teian operational at scale. Individual employees can submit improvement ideas through the system, route them to the right people, track them through implementation, and see the impact aggregated across the organization. Without infrastructure, kaizen teian stalls at whatever volume the central team can personally process. With it, the system can handle the high-volume, low-individual-impact pattern that kaizen teian is designed to produce.
The kaizen event support comes through project templates, structured workflows, and the visual management tools that teams use during the event week and throughout the action plan completion phase. The platform enables coordinated execution of multiple concurrent kaizen events across departments, sites, or facilities -- with leadership visibility into status, impact, and bottlenecks.
The kaikaku effort, given its longer timeline and broader scope, benefits from the same project management capabilities that support large strategic initiatives. The collaboration across departments and functions that a kaikaku requires is supported by the platform's notification, assignment, and reporting features.
The cross-departmental visibility lets leaders see the relationship between the three layers -- how individual kaizen teian ideas relate to active kaizen events, and how those events fit within the larger kaikaku effort. This visibility is what makes the sequenced approach operational at scale rather than aspirational.
The impact tracking covers all five categories Albanesa identifies as kaikaku outcomes: safety, quality, delivery, cost, and people. Programs that track only cost systematically undercount their value because most improvements affect multiple dimensions and many produce value that doesn't convert cleanly to a dollar figure.
None of this substitutes for the leadership commitment and methodology discipline Albanesa describes. The platform amplifies the practice; it doesn't replace it. For organizations pursuing the kaikaku-then-kaizen sequence at scale, the infrastructure matters in the same way that infrastructure matters for any operational discipline.
Albanesa Ymaya is Founder, President, and CEO of Ymaya Lean Academy Inc., based in the Dominican Republic. An industrial engineer with more than 17 years of Lean transformation experience, she has led transformations in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, North Carolina, and Herlev (Denmark). She holds postgraduate credentials in Quality and Productivity Management, with specializations in Project Management and Logistics Management, and certifications including Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Six Sigma Green Belt, ISO and TL 9000 Auditor, Kepner-Tregoe Practical Problem Solving, Maynard Operation Sequence Technique (MOST), and Shingo Model training. She has managed project portfolios exceeding $10 million and has received international awards including Lean Coach of the Year, Plant Lean of the Year, and Operations Excellence Award. She has trained more than 6,000 people across Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe. Albanesa also serves as Caribbean Region Director for the Love and Kindness Project Foundation, founded by Karyn Ross.
What's the difference between kaizen events and kaikaku?
Kaizen events are structured, time-boxed efforts (typically 3-5 days) where a multifunctional team improves one specific process using one or two Lean tools. The scope is bounded and the improvement is incremental. Kaikaku is radical transformation that redesigns an entire system or process, uses whatever combination of Lean and adjacent methods the transformation requires, and produces simultaneous improvement across safety, quality, delivery, cost, and people. The timeline is longer (60 to 180 days, sometimes up to a year) and the scope is broader. They're complementary rather than competitive -- mature programs use both.
Why does Albanesa argue for starting with kaikaku rather than kaizen events?
Because kaizen events on a process that needs transformation produce optimization of a broken system. The team works hard, applies the methodology correctly, and improves the specific assigned problem. The underlying systemic dysfunction persists. Over time, new variations of the same problem emerge. The improvement program produces real activity but limited systemic change. Starting with kaikaku redesigns the system first, creating the conditions where subsequent kaizen events produce meaningful improvement rather than cosmetic adjustments. The phrase Albanesa returns to: kaikaku gives you transformation; kaizen sustains the gains.
What are the four types of kaizen and how do they differ?
Kaizen teian is people-driven suggestion -- individual employees identifying opportunities in their own work, often implementing solutions themselves. Kaizen events are structured 3-5 day team efforts focused on improving one specific process. Kaikaku is radical transformation that redesigns an entire system. Kakushin is innovation that changes what work is done (not just how). The four types operate at different scales and produce different kinds of impact. Most organizations operate primarily in one or two of these modes. Mature programs use all four, deployed deliberately based on the scope of the challenge.
Does kaikaku require substantial capital investment?
The common assumption is yes. Albanesa's experience contradicts this consistently. The transformations she has led have typically required modest investment because the operational constraint in most kaikaku efforts is creativity, not capital. One of the Hiroyuki Hirano commandments for kaikaku is explicitly "don't spend money" -- use creativity instead. Teams that can't redesign a process without buying new equipment usually haven't fully analyzed the existing process. The capital expense assumption is one of the reasons many leaders prefer kaizen events to kaikaku, but the assumption is often wrong.
What is the 3P-LT formula?
A framework Albanesa uses across Lean transformations. The Three P's are People, Product, and Process. The LT stands for Lean Transformation. The formula combines kaikaku (first), kaizen events (to sustain and optimize), kaizen teian (for ongoing autonomous improvement), and kakushin (where innovation is appropriate). The 3P emphasis matters because Lean transformation isn't only about process -- it's also about transforming the people who do the work and the products customers receive. Programs that optimize process while ignoring people or product produce technically improved systems that fail to capture the full available value.
How do you handle resistance to kaikaku in organizations that prefer incremental change?
Resistance is the normal starting point. Albanesa names several specific sources: lack of understanding of what kaikaku actually involves, fear of doing things radically differently, the incorrect belief that kaikaku requires substantial capital, and the intuition that step-by-step improvement is safer. Her experience is that the safer-feeling incremental sequence often produces less safe results, because the underlying systemic problems persist while the program polishes symptoms. The work of overcoming resistance is leadership work -- helping leaders understand the actual scope of kaikaku, the actual investment required, and the actual outcomes possible. Without that understanding, leaders default to the more comfortable sequence, regardless of whether it serves the organization's needs.
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