Introducing Kaizen—The Art of Delivering Continuous Enhanced Outcomes based on artfully combining different resilience and wisdom practices
Kaizen is a Japanese business philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement across an organization. The word “kaizen” translates to “change for the better”. The philosophy is based on the idea that small, incremental changes can lead to significant improvements over time. The same principles apply to cultivating personal resilience and wisdom.
The Kokoro Personal Wisdom app includes several tools to track and measure your progress. These include:
- Personal Integral Resilience Baseline and Integral Resilience Quotient (IRQ) Forms
- Sets a baseline for your physical, emotional, perceptual, spiritual, and relational resilience. The Profiler helps you plan your resilience building program, pointing to focuses most germane to your Integral Resilience Plan.
- Field Notes Form
- Enables you to track and to measure errors (“falling off”), wins, and recoveries in all your important negotiations—the secret to continuous enhanced performance. You can use Field Notes to track your discoveries in cultivating Integral Resilience and Wisdom which will translate directly in enhanced performance in all your personal and business negotiations and other important encounters in daily life.
- Player Integrity Profile (PIPS) for Self
- One of the keys to enhanced wisdom is to know yourself, as Socrates taught, PIPS focuses your attention on some essentials. PIPS/IRQ Scoring Form – Between Parties allows you to track your important interactions with other parties.
- Explorers Wheel
- Enables you to develop the power of “inter-tidal thinking”, connecting large domains of knowledge and experience around your important questions. You may observe the interesting phenomenon noted by NASA that resilience need not decline with advancing age. In fact, scientists of neuroplasticity are discovering that as more neurons fire together, they wire together. Which suggests your cognitive powers—including your ability to uncover connections—may increase as you enjoy playing the Explorers Wheel!
- Caveat: The cultivation of Integral Resilience and ultimately wisdom is in some respects very different that kaizen in a business setting. In fact, some might argue that the entire idea of “progress” is antithetical to the development, which is far more an organic process more akin to careful gardening that it is to the relentless pursuit of measurable outcomes as required under 20th century business principles. Kokoro is attempting to bridge these very different worlds with the higher goals of helping users attain greater levels of equanimity, foresight, clarity, compassion, forbearance, balance, resilience, and other virtues associated with wisdom.