Twitter And Kaizen

Guest blogger Valeria Maltoni has a post over at the Pistachio Consulting blog about how blogging has helped her "to practice kaizen, the art of continuous improvement for writing, ideas, and community-building."

According to Maltoni:

Beyond the obvious ability to have a fast dialogue or point of access with customers, they can learn to understand what to listen for, to help guide and connect people to resources, and connect to what’s next for ideas, trends, and executions.

She also makes the point that "Continuous practice of sharing and community building yields productivity improvements."

It does make a sort of sense -- the idea of an engaged community around a process, continually interacting, all empowered to pull the cord and stop the show. After all, isn't kaizen a way of crowdsourcing accountability?

Another interesting observation:

"One interesting application of the microsharing idea . . . is the polishing and improvement of stories by clustering – adding additional data points and resources from the network."

Although it still seems a tenuous connection (and although some might argue that Twitter is by its very nature a waste of time), between her points about continuously improving customer service, and improving internal storytelling and knowledge sharing (which can help in teambuilding, knowledge retention and collaboration) it seems like with a little continuous improvement of the #kaizenblog idea, Maltoni et al might really be onto something.