The Fosbury Flop: Why Breakthrough Improvement, "Kaikaku," Beats Kaizen When Time Matters

Everybody has heard of Kaizen, because it makes and keeps a neat little promise. Unfortunately, it often keeps teams wading in the shallow end of the pool. Breakthrough improvements are really the better story, don't you think?

Let's jump in. 

In 1968, an awkward university student named Dick Fosbury changed high jumping forever by doing something that looked completely wrong.

While everyone else perfected the Western Roll and Straddle techniques, methodical incremental improvements to the traditional form, Fosbury literally went backwards. His "Fosbury Flop" approach had him launching over the bar backwards and headfirst, landing on his back.

Coaches called it dangerous. Traditionalists called it a gimmick. Oh.. okay...? 

Let's go see who made it on the podium. What's your guess, the traditionalists or Dick Fosbury?

By all physiological metrics the LEAST athletic participant in the event, Fosbury easily won gold at the 1968 Olympics. He made every other technique obsolete overnight. Within a decade, nearly every elite high jumper had adopted his "backwards" method.

The Manufacturing Improvement "Kaizen" Timeline

Traditionalist manufacturing improvement follows predictable phases. 

First twelve weeks: considering whether to bring in outside expertise or double down with internal resources. Many readers are within these first 12 weeks at this moment! Welcome. 

Weeks 13-20: We found the expert. 30+ years in the industry. A real fixture of our region. 

Consultant: Opens briefcase. What's inside? The Western Roll. Value Stream Mapping. Meticulous assessment and planning. Daily meetings. Seminars, glossary sheets, count footsteps, 30-cycle time studies. Statistical distribution data analysis. Ooh... this one's a gamma, so we're gonna have to really dig. 

Weeks 21-28: Meetings. Rearranging workstations. Pilot implementations and refinements. Consultant exits after 16 weeks on site. 

Outcome: Party with cake. We have reduced weekly walking distance by 700 feet per employee (in the pilot cell). We now project 6% labor savings per part. 

Current Calculated Parts and Labor: Parts = $120, Labor = $32.00

Improved Calculated Parts and Labor: Parts = $120, Labor = $30.08

Those are certainly outcomes. They didn't make anything worse. The consultant was precise. His guidance was confident and well-practiced. Your team knows your processes better than anyone. Your engineering staff has deep technical knowledge. Your operators understand the practical constraints and know their tasks extremely well. Everything is INSANELY precise and provable. Unfortunately this might have been a waste of 28 weeks. 

"Kaikaku," or The Factory Fosbury Flop

Kaikaku means breakthrough improvement. 

I hadn't heard this word until this week (well I still haven't heard it, I've only seen it in writing). 

Anyways, by this "Japanese principle," instead of incrementally optimizing existing processes, you fundamentally reimagine them. Instead of gradual assessment phases leading to gradual implementation phases, you systematically identify constraints and engineer solutions.

Breakthrough Timeline:

First twelve weeks: considering whether to bring in outside expertise or double down with internal resources. Many readers are within these first 12 weeks at this moment! Welcome. (Worth mentioning, I could save you 3 months of losses if you decide sooner - and ROI is guaranteed.) 

• Week 13: We brought in the MR Guy. Constraint identification and throughput analysis

• Weeks 14-16: Systematic redesign and rapid prototyping

• Week 17: Implementation with embedded monitoring systems

Target performance achieved and sustainable - and we're looking at more than 6%, folks. 

Less time, better results. 

Why This Feels Counterintuitive

The traditional approach makes sense. And it is familiar. It is familiar because it is done every day by tons of teams globally. Thorough analysis reduces implementation risk. Gradual rollouts allow for course corrections. Extended timelines accommodate learning curves and organizational change management.

These are legitimate considerations from experienced manufacturing professionals.

But for two reasons, choose breakthrough improvements. 

For the time on site, let's just compare two approaches for similar results. 

Similar results? Never. But let's say these two methods both arrive at the same 6% savings. I would never walk away from anything with 6% but I can pretend if we really need to keep it apples to apples. 

Improvement per week.

Did you know you can just make up metrics to compare things?

Traditionalist

6% / 16 weeks = 0.375% improvement per project week

Breakthrough

6% / 5 weeks = 1.20% improvement per project week

This shows that accomplishing a result in 5 weeks is better than the same result in 16 weeks by about 3.2x. 

...Now consider the disruption. 

Traditionalist

Meetings

32 x $1,000 meetings (two per week, all participant salary and opportunity cost of halted throughput)

Implementation

Two Work Days to move all the desks around and plug everything back in. 

Breakthrough

Meetings? 

No. I will work and speak with operators sparingly. Maybe 5-10 minutes?

I will work and speak with managers and directors as requested, engineers as needed

I will present Options and Recommendations once I have play-tested any hypotheses or assumptions

Implementation

I will look for opportunities to grow throughput by 2x, 5x, or 10x in every way possible including streamlining, reassignment, strategic support, fixturing, work holding, error-proofing, material presentation, design for assembly and design for manufacturability, BOM simplification, job design, and work precedence improvements. 

Everywhere I've served, I have found hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings and throughput improvements. I love throughput. Not every option or recommendation is selected for implementation. But you can depend on significant throughput and quality improvements in every project. 

If your factory would be better off if you could just make more each day of what you sell, toss the tradition and perhaps start with a free baseline assessment.

If you're already making enough product each day for all customers, meeting monthly shipment targets, and rarely struggling with shortages or stoppages, your system is already in pretty good shape, and you might instead benefit from sales and marketing improvements. Those are things I am not qualified to touch. I mean just look at this website. I spent more time debugging one html hyperlink issue than it took to solve an $85,000/month quality problem. And I have no clue why some key elements don't show up on Google. ...I'll stick to productivity & throughput. 

Practical Kaikaku Framework

Week 1: Constraint Reality Mapping, material flow observation. Systems, Processes, Methods, - inputs and outputs. Track actual parts through actual processes. Identify where work stops, not where procedures say it should flow. Note backlogs and queues. Find imbalance and busy work. Many bottlenecks hide behind "that's just how we've always done it" explanations.

Week 2-4: Systematic Process Redesign Challenge fundamental assumptions. "Why do we batch this operation?" "What if we eliminated this inspection step?" "Could we mistake-proof this instead of error-detecting it?" Design solutions that make defects impossible, not just catch bad parts before loading them onto the truck.

Week 5: Implementation Instill changes, deploy automatic feedback mechanisms. Create visual management that makes highlights deviations. Build monitoring into the process, not on top of it.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Continuous Improvement

Most manufacturing operations have capable, dedicated teams working on legitimate improvement initiatives. Kaizen events deliver measurable gains. Value stream mapping identifies optimization opportunities. Statistical process control maintains quality standards.

The challenge isn't competence. The challenge is velocity. Those first 12 weeks are not the time to be meticulous when you're missing $10,000 per day in revenue. 

When you're systematically optimizing a fundamentally constrained process, improvements simply plateau. 

When massive breakthrough thinking eliminates constraints entirely, performance curves jump to new levels.

When Backwards Thinking Becomes Forward Thinking

Dick Fosbury's technique looked wrong until Olympic medals proved otherwise. His innovation wasn't about "higher jumping." He just noticed his hips were always hitting the bar, so he invented a whole new jump that maximized the vertical displacement of his hips.

Manufacturing breakthrough thinking works similarly. Instead of asking "How do we make this process better?" ask "What if this process didn't exist?"

Sometimes, (well at least One Time), the most productive question isn't "How can we get more experts involved and keep track of the (always missing) tape measure to help identify and sort each pallet of these components when they arrive?" but rather "Why can't the fab shop dump all of these 96 parts into 8 labeled bins rather than in one big sloppy pile?" 

At a previous employer we faced an incoming Bureau of Workers' Compensation (BWC) visit the same day a huge delivery of steel arrived. The fire extinguisher was now 100% obstructed, and the pallets were double- and triple-stacked, wall-to-wall, down the aisle. The supervisor, Nate, looked at the few inches between each pallet and started listing who he'd pull from production to use forklifts and pallet jacks to scoot all the pallets outward by a few inches each. Hopefully this would add up to create just enough walkway toward the center to reach the extinguisher. He planned to go all-hands on deck for the next 30 minutes so we wouldn't be out of compliance when the auditors arrived. 

I surveyed the crowded floor and all the sheet metal, then glanced up at the extinguisher hanging in its bracket. There was a little sign pointing down to it from above. Four (4) screws held them in place.

"Actually, Nate, what if I go reprint the area map and you could just ask maintenance to put the extinguisher over there. And can you let the rest of the guys know we're moving it?"  

So I pointed 'Over there' to another wall, cleaner, with better lighting, and a location that would never be inadvertently blocked by materials. Today's steel is not the problem. The planning was the problem. This was a mistake from 20 years ago.

 I remember this only because of the way he stood there with his arms crossed, one hand covering his chin and mouth. He squinted, tilted his head, and half‑nodded, like half “who are you,” half “I think there's something really wrong with this guy."

"Yeah, no problem, easy," he motioned away from his chin to the blocked pathway, "Man, but who thinks like that?" 

When the old guard teaches teams to “straddle” constraints, backwards thinking asks if those constraints even exist. 

Flip a problem on its head. Practice object impermanence. You might uncover something innovative hiding behind twenty years of “that’s just how we do it.”

Both continuous improvement and breakthrough methodology can move the needle. But only one gets you to target performance in 12 weeks instead of 52.

But right now you need to decide: keep perfecting your “Western Roll,” or change the game entirely.

Ready to see what backwards thinking could reveal in your operation? Let’s pinpoint the constraints you’ve been working around instead of eliminating.

Understanding Variation: Managing Chaos

March 31, 2025

by Mitch Robinson

This quote is from Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos, by Donald Wheeler, and perhaps it has just changed your life. Check out the book if you're interested in a bit of profound knowledge. 

“Every data set contains noise. 

  Some data sets also contain signals. 

  Before you can detect the signals within your data, 

  you must filter out the noise.” 

           -Wheeler

If your company is comparing sales or defects or shipments "month over month" or "versus this time last year" they are wasting everyone's time and attention. Learn about the nature of variance in statistics and save a string of pointless meetings!

Get yourself a copy of this "cult classic" for $5. 

link: Understanding Variation - The Key to Managing Chaos 

"We live in the Information Age, and much of that information comes to us in the form of numbers. 

...But before numerical information can be useful it must be analyzed, interpreted, and assimilated. 

...Unfortunately, teaching the techniques for making sense of data has been neglected at all levels of our educational system. 

...As a result, throughout culture there is little appreciation of how to effectively use the volumes of data generated by both business and government. This book can remedy that situation. 

...Readers report that this book as changed both the way they look a data and the very form of their monthly reports. It has turned arguments about the numbers into a common understanding of what needs to be done about them. These techniques and benefits have been thoroughly proven in a wide variety of settings. Read this book and use the techniques to gain the benefits for your company." 

If nothing else check out the mind-bending examples of how well-meaning managers inadvertently manipulated their actions to satisfy metrics, usually to show progress or improvement, much to the inadvertent detriment of their businesses. 

I'll take the OVER if we're betting: 

"This still happens in 95% of companies and almost everybody is blind to the underlying facts."

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