Kaizen within kaizen teams: Continuous and process improvements in a Spanish municipality

Organizations of today are facing an increasingly turbulent environment. Learning from concepts founded on Scientific Management such as TQM and Quality Control Circles, the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen has permeated numerous organizations across the world. Teams have been used across all levels of organizations to promote ideas and projects to aid in creating a flexible learning organization adept to survive in such chaotic and unpredictable environments. Although a plethora of successful projects and improvements have been reported and employed in organizations, most teams are usually temporary and disband after a project has been seen from conceptualization to implementation. However, in some organizations, not all teams are disbanded; they may go on to look at another project or projects that can help their organizations. Despite this burgeoning of teams to help with organizational learning and development, the teams themselves are not provided with understanding the complexity of the team experience in terms of internal processes and outcomes: a Kaizen system for Kaizen Teams. Why is this important? Teams in organizations need to have a method to understand the complex nature of its experience, measure and map out significant aspects and to be able to create concrete action steps for their own development as a team. We introduce a model and method called the Team Directed Learning and Development Inventory or TLI (Lingham, 2004) as an immediate and effective way to achieve this goal. Such as methodology would certainly be useful for teams as it would help them to engage in a team-directed learning process as a fundamental nature of their development.