Kaikaku – a complement to emergence based development

Abstract

Radical change, or Kaikaku, is typically organized as a top-down change project based on a design process strategy. Creative processes are emergent and tend to refuse goal-steering. Still, group creativity and emergence could play an important part in Kaikaku projects. A vision formulated in a creative process, may be an order parameter in emergence and continuously direct, align and commit the actions of the people involved in the Kaikaku.

Full text

First International Conference on Design Creativity, ICDC 2010
29 November - 1 December 2010, Kobe, Japan
Kaikaku – A Complement to Emergence based Development
Tomas Backstrom and Bengt Olof Koping Olsson
Mälardalen University, Sweden
Abstract. Radical change, or Kaikaku, is typically organized
as a top-down change project based on a design process
strategy. Creative processes are emergent and tend to refuse
goal-steering. Still, group creativity and emergence could
play an important part in Kaikaku projects. A vision
formulated in a creative process, may be an order parameter
in emergence and continuously direct, align and commit the
actions of the people involved in the Kaikaku.
Keywords: emergence, creativity, design, order parameter,
Kaikaku, Kaizen
1 Introduction
This is a position paper written in the beginning of a
research project supporting and studying Kaikaku
processes at four Swedish engineering companies. The
writers of this paper believes in emergence (Glăveanu,
2010; Sawyer, 2005) and creativity on group and
organizational level (Paulus & Nijstad, 2003;
Thompson & Choi, 2005) as the main organization
form for development of production systems or
organizations. But for Kaikaku “a top-down approach
is often mentioned” (Yamamoto, 2010, p 26).
The paper will unfold our thinking about change
organized as an emergence process based on group
creativity. It will describe a contradiction between this
and change organized as a project; a top-down initiated
and controlled design process. At the end it will
discuss how to combine them in a Kaikaku project.
The conclusion is that group creativity and
emergence could play an important part in especially
two occations of the Kaikaku project. Firstly, in the
creative task of formulating a vision for the Kaikaku.
Secondly, in using this vision to continuously direct,
align and commit the actions of the people involved in
the Kaikaku.
2 Kaikaku
The Japanese word Kaikaku means reformation,
drastic change, or radical change and is often
mentioned in contrast to Kaizen, meaning
improvement (Yamamoto, 2010). Kaizen maintains
and improves the work system through incremental
change and Kaikaku means a radical improvement,
replacing existing practices and obtaining dramatic
results. A rather recent trend in Japanese industry is to
combine Kaizen with infrequent Kaikaku (Yamamoto,
2010). A Kaikaku is a radical performance
improvement in production (>30%).
Tidd & Bessant (2009) introduce a pattern of
‘punctuated equilibrium’ in order to explain how
incremental and radical processes are related. Most of
the time innovation is about exploiting and elaborating
but occasionally there is a need for a breakthrough
which creates a new trajectory for iterative and
incremental processes.
Vedin (1985) maintain that rapid growth adds a
dimension of freedom in that the organization simply
has to be re-shaped frequently, allowing both for
spontaneous creative organizational ideas and for
implementing lessons from earlier mistakes.
Incremental development processes has typically a
broad array of divergent initiatives contributing to
gradual improvement. But such bottom-up emergence
of change has a limit. Radical change, or Kaikaku,
where the frames for work are changed, is beyond the
reach for bottom-up processes. It typically has to be
organized by the management as a top-down change
project, preferably based on a design process strategy.
The initiation and control of a Kaikaku is normally
performed by top-management and their
representatives, e.g. the establishment of aggressive
goals, resource allocation, authoritative and forceful
backing. This does not mean that collaborative and
participative processes are impossible.
3 Emerging Change
The emergence perspective of change is implicit in
some theories of organization using a bottom-up
strategy with collaborative and participative processes.
For example, lean production system and Kaizen, or

2 T. Backström and B. K. Olsson
continuous improvement, has several connection
points with the emerging change perspective that we
are using.
There are several reasons behind our focus on
creativity, emergence and bottom-up development
processes. Change processes on societal level is
leading us into a world where emergence is more
common. Information is more accessible for everyone,
more and more action is decided using communication
in networks and the boundaries between different
activities and organizations is diminishing. This global
connectivity between organizations, markets and
humans logically increase the speed of change and
increase the demands on flexibility and creativity for
organizations to be long term competitive. The
workforce of the western society is more and more
educated, and have higher demands than materiel out-
come of their work. Distributed responsibility and
bottom-up processes is one way to make use of their
increasing competence and make it possible for them
to reach self-fulfillment at work. At last, there has
been a development towards flat and lean organization
of work giving the lower levels of managers an
increasingly demanding work situation, with a lot of
subordinates and scarce support. Bottom-up solutions
with more responsibility given to employees, is one
way to deal with managers work situation.
Group creativity is one starting point in our study
of emergence as a form of organization of
development. Group creativity appear when
individuals with divergent competence offer their ideas
to a group and, at the same time, subordinate their
ideas to converging group ideas emerging in their
interaction (Olsson, 2008). The group members are at
the same time autonomous, following their individual
way of acting and thinking, and simultaneously
integrated to the group, following the way of acting
and thinking of the group.
To be able to scout unknown areas of knowledge
and ideas (Marion, 1999) between the individual
competences of each group member, their interaction
has to fulfill a duality of two conflicting qualities. The
first quality is diversity. Each team member has to be
willing and able to both express and argue for his/her
perspective and understanding in the interaction. The
diversity quality is important to be able use all relevant
individual competence of the group in the creative
process. The second quality is convergence. Each team
member has to be willing and able to both understand
and be influenced by the others. Convergence is
needed to be able to talk about the same thing; a group
idea (Olsson, 2008). The group members will focus
and relate their actions to an emerging group idea. The
group idea is the vehicle the group uses to travel
together and be able to scout places of knowledge and
ideas between each of them.
The group idea is an emerging order parameter
structuring or organizing the interaction of the group.
Order parameter is originally a mathematical concept;
it is a way to reduce the amount of information needed
to describe a complex system (Haken, 1996). The
traditional way to handle complicated systems is to
analyze, i.e. divide the system in understandable parts
and describe each part, and synthesize, i.e. make a sum
of these descriptions. But complex systems have
macro features emerging out of the interaction of the
parts (the whole is greater than the sum of the parts).
This crucial feature will be missed, if we only look at
one part at the time. An alternative strategy is to find
order parameters at macro level, which describes the
most important features of each agent at micro level.
The mathematical proofs of the concept are valid only
close to instability points, but it has empirically
showed to useful even far from such points. An order
parameter emerges when fluctuations of individuals
strengthen and stabilize each other and thus forms a
pattern at macro level which wins the competition with
all other possible patterns. This pattern will then
control actions of all individuals.
There are different levels of order parameters. A
human being is at the same time involved in different
processes of different length and with different pace,
and all these different processes may have different
order parameters. In a group meeting, for example, a
weave of different group ideas will function as order
parameter for shorter or longer periods of the meeting.
On a higher level, in a project, including several
meetings with individual work between, an order
parameter of the project may emerge. In the last part of
the paper, we will talk about how order parameters can
be used to commit the members of a Kaikaku project
to align their work in the same direction.
To lead emergence is a specific task for managers,
complementing other tasks like administrate to ensure
that the organization continue to function as planned,
and drive change projects and individual competence
development to ensure that the organization adapt to
changes in the environment (Backström, Granberg, &
Wilhelmson, 2008). The task leading emergence has a
focus neither on the system nor the individual, but on
the collective. The normal leader-follower duality is
replaced by a collective including the manager and all
subordinates (Drath et al., 2008). The ideal is a
collective with members having different roles, but
following the same order parameters and acting with
heedfulness towards the whole organization
(Hagström, Backström, & Göransson, 2009). The role
of the leader in the collective is to represent the
wholeness, the goals of the organization, the visions of

Kaikaku – a complement to emergence based development le 3
the top-managers, and the long term perspective in the
communication. The role of the others is to represent
their specific competence and understanding of the
local situation they are in. The manager has to give
prerequisites for this collective to emerge; e.g. develop
the communication habits of the collective and support
solution of role conflicts (Åteg et al., 2009). There has
to be a focus on continuous development and good
results, if not, the collective will stagnate and become
petrified in their habits.
The ideal is a creative dynamic balance between
autonomy and divergence, on one side, and integration
and convergence, on the other. Some organizations
have more of autonomy than integration and others
have the opposite, and neither is good for emergent
development (Backström, 2009). Too much
integration, compared to autonomy, makes it hard for
individuals to develop their work at all. The opposite
decreases the possibility for individual development
initiatives to contribute to the development of the
whole organization. In figure 1 and 2 we expand our
thinking about the concepts of autonomy and
integration in organization.
Fig. 1. Importent aspects of organization to reach autonomy
of the employees.
Fig. 2. Importent aspects of organization to have the
employees integrated in it.
4 Contradictions between Design and
Emergence
Design and emergence is seen by some authors as two
exluding cathegories of development processes (Capra,
2002). The designed parts of an organization are
formed for certain aims and are manifestations of
consious meaning and pupose. The emergent parts are
formed in interaction between members of the
organization while working, without no-one trying to
control it or even knowing about it. The designed parts
have a purpose to ensure effectiveness and high
quality. The emergent parts make it possible
continuously and immediately adapt to different
situations locally and to learn from it.
This paper is dealing with this contradiction
between design and emergence. Design, “the network
of activities performed with a goal of producing
design” (O'Donovan, Browning, Eckert, & Clarkson,
2005, p62), is a planned and structured process with a
formulated goal. Creative processes tend to refuse
goal-steering but house improvisational openness;
these processes emerge towards something earlier
unknown. Both processes have an aim, e.g. a problem
to solve. The design process formulates a controlled
path towards the goal. The creative process suggests
attitudes for people involved and prerequisites for their
work, and the importance of sensitivity towards each
unique process, sooner than control. The designed
parts of a solution or product were consciously
elaborated; the creative parts were a unforeseen.
To focus on emergence means to have certain way
to understand change and control. One control
philosophy is to react on signals, to stay passive until
there is a need to act. Using this philosophy you are
controlled by the external world and the signals from
it. Another control philosophy is to proactively
formulate a strategy how to create and reach the goal.
This has similarities with a design strategy. You are
active and try to control the external world. The
philosophy behind emerging change is reciprocal
development processes, where partners together build
their common part of the world and form their own
future.
Kaikaku, and traditional production system
development, is normally organized in projects.
Design science deals with this type of change
processes. Kaizen, or continuous improvement, on the
other hand is a way to organize for development as
emergence. Does the perspective of emergence have
any implications for a Kaikaku project?

4 T. Backström and B. K. Olsson
5 Kaikaku – Combining Design and
Emergence
A Kaikaku is a development process giving a radical
performance improvement in production (>30%). It
usually goes through the following stages (Yamamoto,
2010), p 6): analyzing the current status quo,
identifying the production strategy, formulate the
desired future state of production, transition, and
manage and improve the transformed system.
One step of a Kaikau is to formulate the desired
future state of production. The formulation of this
vision is a creative task. In our research we plan to
have a work shop in the beginning of the project with
the goal to form the vision of the Kaikaku. The vision
will be emerging in a creative process involving
representatives from the company, researchers and
persons invited in order to increase the divergence
concerning competence and way to understand the
world.
We believe that a common vision of the Kaikaku is
very important. It is the guideline to be used in the
design part of the project: formulating goals, planning
the work and forming a strategy how to reach the goal.
But even in well planned projects there will be
unplanned parts where individuals will have to decide
by themselves how to deal with things. A good vision
also function as a guideline in these situations, and
thus as an order parameter for all processes of
emergence (Backström, Strömberg, & Sjödin, 2010).
A model of how to form and use a common vision
is described by (Källström, 1995). The model consists
of five parts:
1. Vision, the top-managers understanding,
developed in dialogue, of what the
organization is striving for, giving direction,
inspiration and support communication. It
should be so simple that everyone can
understand and remember it. The vision should
also be open and unclear, because it has be
usable in every situation and it is good if there
is always a need of interpretation.
2. Communication, to sell the vision and reach
consensus, making it possible for employees to
act accordingly. This show respect to the
employees, and gives them information and
understanding about the work context.
3. Consensus, when accepted, the vision is a law
against which managers and colleagues may
judge action.
4. Force, to be used very seldom, only in
situations e.g. due to lack of time or the
inability of single employees to accept the
vision.
5. Control, continuous dialogue and feed-back
around the use of the vision to study if the
vision is understood and used correctly, to
show that managers care, and to motivate use
of the vision.
6 Conclusions
Group creativity and emergence could play an
important part of development processes, such as
Kaikaku projects, using a design strategy. Especially
in two occations. Firstly, in the creative task of
formulating a vision for the Kaikaku. Secondly, in
using this vision to continuously direct, align and
commit the actions of the people involved in the
Kaikaku.
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