A Thousand Tweaks: The Road to Productivity

How do you improve the sales-contracting process, or any other legal process?

The standard approach in the West is to treat improvement as a one-off project with a start and an end.

For Toyota it was and is a permanently active loop. A discipline of small, continuous improvements. In other words, a continuing habit – the opposite of a one-off event.

Kaizen.

You find a small piece of friction. You form a hypothesis about a better way to deal with it. You try it, measure the result, and either keep the change or discard it. Then you repeat the exercise for the next piece of friction.

The magic isn’t in any single turn of the wheel; it’s in the compounding. A one-percent improvement, repeated and sustained, eventually outruns almost any heroic transformation programme.

This Oh Lawdy! is based on a really good article by Ian Jempson on how to use AI for Kaizen. You can find the article here.

16th June 2026