How to Think Better with Reproductive Thinking. Use The Efficient Kaizen Thinking to Refine what is known and achieve incremental improvement.

February 23, 2009 by kutenk
Filed under: Business Skills - Thinking Skills 

Reproductive thinking is a way to refine what is known; it aims for efficiency.

Reproductive thinking is essentially a matter of repeating the past: doing what you’ve done before and thinking what you’ve thunk before. You can visualize reproductive thinking on a continuum. At one end is mindless repetition, in the middle is conscious systematization, and at the other end is incremental improvement, or kaizen thinking.

Let’s start with the crudest form of reproductive thinking, reactive or nonthinking, in which a given stimulus produces a fixed, predictable response. The way you brush your teeth each morning, from unscrewing the cap of your toothpaste, to the way you dab the bristles of your toothbrush, to the length and strength and shape of the strokes you take—all of these are performed with the minimum possible exertion of brain power. This most basic form of reproductive thinking, a mode of thought below the horizon of consciousness that causes us to respond to stimuli with predictable reactions. These fossilized ideas can save us time and energy, but they can also cause us to repeat patterns that aren’t particularly useful or are no longer valid.

In the second level of reproductive thinking, we consciously reproduce learned thoughts and actions to achieve predictable results.
We often consciously repeat patterns because it makes good sense to do so. It makes us more efficient, more proficient, and less likely to omit crucial steps. This higher level of reproductive thinking is a wonderful asset. It marshals proven methodologies and approaches to design processes that are fast, efficient, and defect-free.

The third level of reproductive thinking is kaizen thinking: consciously following well-established, proven patterns while looking for ways to improve them.
Kaizen comes from the Japanese. It literally means “good change” (kai = “change,” zen = “good”). Kaizen has been the foundation and rallying cry of a variety of related productivity and quality movements in the United States and other modern industrial countries: continuous quality improvement (CQI), total quality management (TQM), quality circles, and Six Sigma, among others. Toyota and General Electric are famous for their use of it. Ironically, kaizen is both the most useful form of reproductive thinking in that it focuses on continually monitoring and refining processes, products, and procedures and the most dangerous in that it provides the illusion of innovation under the guise of incremental change.

Kaizen is characterized by the principle of incremental change. It holds that each day a process can be made a little bit better than it was the day before.
Kaizen has provided substantial benefits. It has been used to make production lines more reliable, reduce medical errors, and speed up emergency response times. But kaizen has its limits. No amount of incremental change will turn an adding machine into a spreadsheet.

Each level of reproductive thinking—rote repetition, conscious systematization, and continuous improvement—can be a powerful asset. Many organizations that
have focused on it, particularly on kaizen, have prospered. But reproductive thinking alone can’t do the whole job. It may be great for producing zero defects, but it will never produce breakthrough change. As Nicholas Negoponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, has written, “Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy.”

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