Kaizen vs Atomic Habits: at Toyota, someone read your suggestion

In 1951, the first year of Toyota’s Creative Idea Suggestion System, workers handed in 789 ideas. By fiscal 1972 the figure was 168,000, against an internal target of 120,000. Those numbers come from a 1973 Toyota release, and they describe something quite unlike the lone person ticking off a daily habit.

What did kaizen mean at Toyota?

Kaizen, at Toyota, was a worker proposing a change and somebody else deciding what to do with it. The Japanese word is usually translated “change for the better,” but the institution behind it was a pipeline: an idea went in, a committee looked at it, and a verdict came out.

Toyota’s own history says the scheme began in 1951 after Eiji Toyoda visited a Ford plant and saw a suggestion program that rewarded creative fixes on the production floor. The 1951 handbook told workers that ideas could be submitted verbally, and that it did not matter how small they were. According to the 1973 release, plant-level subcommittees passed suggestions up to an 800-member Screening Board, and about 70% of them were about eliminating or simplifying production steps.

Where does Training Within Industry fit in?

The other root is American. Training Within Industry (TWI) was a WWII program with three modules: Job Instruction, Job Relations and Job Methods. Job Methods taught workers to question every step of their own job and then eliminate, combine, rearrange or simplify. Its sequence, as summarized on Wikipedia, ends in a social act: develop the new method, sell it to the boss and co-workers for approval on safety, quality, quantity and cost, standardize it, and give credit.

Wikipedia’s kaizen article has TWI reaching Japan in 1951, when Lowell Mellen installed it there. Whether TWI shaped Toyota’s suggestion scheme directly or arrived alongside it is not confirmed by Toyota’s own pages, which credit the Ford visit. Masaaki Imai’s Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success (1986) is what carried the word to Western managers, and it is why most readers meet kaizen as a mindset rather than a process.

I covered the mindset side, including Robert Maurer’s one-minute method, in an earlier post on kaizen. This one is about the part Maurer’s private-life version drops.

What does 1% a day assume?

James Clear’s Atomic Habits (2018) argues that getting 1 percent better every day for a year leaves you thirty-seven times better. The arithmetic checks out: 1.01 multiplied by itself 365 times is 37.783. Run it the other way and 0.99 to the 365th is 0.0255, which Clear describes as declining nearly to zero.

To make that curve apply to a person, three things must hold. The quantity has to be measurable as a single number. Each day’s gain has to be a percentage of the previous day’s total. And the gains have to arrive every day with no ceiling. A runner’s mile time has a floor, and a writer’s pages per day do not double because yesterday went well. The Brailsford marginal-gains post goes through where the “37 times” figure came from and what the cycling record supports, so I will leave that there.

A third assumption hides in the word “better.” A percentage needs a unit, and most morning habits do not have one. Say you start at one push-up a day and add 1% daily: after 30 days you are at 1.35, which rounds to one. The curve is real and invisible for weeks, which is the plateau problem the ice cube post is about. Toyota’s suggestions did not have this problem, because each one was a discrete change to a named step, and either it shipped or it did not.

Here is the contrast I find more interesting than the arithmetic. Compounding has one actor. You improve, you measure, you improve. Nobody receives the improvement but you, and nobody can say “that one won’t work.”

Why does the reviewer matter?

Think about what the Toyota pipeline does that a private ledger cannot. A suggestion has to be written down, which forces it to be specific enough to read. Someone with different information can reject it, which filters out changes that help one station and hurt the next. And an accepted idea gets standardized and credited, so it stops depending on whoever thought of it.

Toyota’s adoption rate moved from 29% in 1956 to 76% in 1972, which suggests the scheme taught people what a usable suggestion looks like. That is my reading of the numbers, not a claim the release makes. The reviewer is the feedback loop.

Solo habit advice has no such loop. If you decide to wake a minute earlier, nothing asks whether the minute was real. This is the same reason people perform differently when someone is watching, and it is where kaizen and Atomic Habits split: Clear’s unit is the repeated action, Toyota’s unit is the proposed change plus its verdict.

What would a kaizen morning look like?

Take the first minutes of the day as the job to be improved. The Job Methods questions are blunt: why is this step done, can it be removed, can it be combined? Most of a bad morning is steps that exist to postpone the one that matters, which is being upright and awake.

DontSnooze, an iPhone alarm, turns that first step into a submission. When the alarm fires you have 30 seconds to record a short video showing you are up. If you miss the window, a random photo from your camera roll goes to your friends. The friends are not a Screening Board; they do not grade your morning, and the app does not claim they do. What they supply is the thing the 1% ledger lacks, which is an audience that sees whether the submission arrived. Whether that is enough of a loop to improve anything beyond showing up, I do not know, and I have not seen evidence either way.

If you want the kaizen version of the practice, keep one more element from the Toyota pipeline: a weekly change. Once the wake-up is reliable, propose one adjustment to your first ten minutes, such as moving the charger across the room or setting out the clothes, and tell a friend what it is. A week later they ask whether it worked, and either answer counts as data.