Kaizen meets Agile

I recently sat in on my first ever kaizen meeting (I am learning Agile by observation). The purpose of the meeting was to review the week, a post-mortem of sorts to discuss issues in an open, constructive way. One meeting directive is "Blame has no place in kaizen". This meeting was strikingly different from other meetings I attend.

- Step 1, each team member wrote an action or issue from the week on a postIt note (different colors help), and placed on a whiteboard which was split into Monday to Friday (left to right), happy to sad (top to bottom). This was frenetic as they had only 5 mins, and were dodging each other.
- Step 2, each day was reviewed, both the good and the bad. As this was occuring, members were transfering issues to index cards (a staple of Agile processes). Interestingly, one of the sad postIt notes was "spectator in kaizen meeting", referring to me.
- Step 3, index cards were laid out on table (including some old ones from previous week), a postIt affixed to side of each card, and team members voted which issue they wanted to discuss, having 5 votes each to distribute among cards. Very democratic.
- Step 4, index cards we discussed in detail in voting order until meeting's end (1.5 hours allocated in total). Cards we given to members who would work on issues the following week.

It was really quite amazing. My observations of the meeting were:-
1) Interactive, due to physical components (posting & voting)
2) Successes were acknowledged and celebrated
3) Opportunity to vent
4) Lo-tech (pen & paper)
5) Productive
6) Fun

Fun? Yes, fun. A fun post-mortem. But aren't post-mortems supposed to be serious affairs? Well, this meeting was serious, and productive, and fun.