How Kaizen masters are 'folded,' not born

There’s a Japanese legend that says folding 1,000 paper cranes will grant you good fortune. Businesses, unfortunately, don’t get their problems solved by origami alone — though folding HR policies into paper planes and launching them across the office has been done before.

- REY ELBO

Still, the metaphor holds true.

The path to mastery in kaizen problem-solving isn’t about brilliance at the first attempt — it’s about persistence, precision and patience repeated at least one thousand times.

Welcome to the Kaizen-Origami Rule. If you can fold at least 1,000 pieces of paper cranes (10 kaizen hours) that would be the equivalent to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of mastering almost any skill.

Think of the Beatles. Malcolm claims the Beatles often played eight hours a day, seven days a week, which added up to well over 10,000 hours of live performance time before their US breakthrough. They weren’t an overnight success; they were an “every single night” success.

Likewise, think of mastery as folding one origami piece after another, until the thousandth piece no longer looks like a crumpled toilet paper but an admirable artifact.

Few professionals have the luxury of spending a decade perfecting their craft before being considered competent —unless they’re trying to master golf, in which case a decade is just the warm-up.

That's where Kaizen offers a different path. Every Kaizen activity — identifying an operational waste, finding its main root cause, testing countermeasures and learning from results — is one origami. Do it once or twice, and you've got a clumsy crane. Doit 100 times, and your folding skills start to become promising. Try again and you've gone from an amateur folder to a great paper sculptor. Indeed, 1,000 maybe ambitious but achievable. Yes, mastery requires extra effort as long you do it before your retirement party.

Origami as a Kaizen teacher