kaizen team

Every once and a while someone will ask me to (discretely) evaluate a kaizen event team's effectiveness.

I recently experienced  the pain associated with coaching a team with poor chemistry. It was a kaizen event team, so the pain was finite.

The kaizen pre-event planning phase is critical to event effectiveness. It includes the obvious - event definition from the perspective of scope and targets, team selection, communication and certain acceptable pre-work, but sometimes the simple stuff gets missed.

Kaizen event team selection is a critical driver of event effectiveness. Selection criteria includes team representation (to promote diversity, perspective, ownership, and development opportunities), size, chemistry, kaizen experience, and behavioral and technical skills.