Hi, I'm Helen and I'm Sarah. And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly podcast where we borrow some brilliance from things we've been reading, watching, listening to or perhaps studying 20 years ago. More to come on that. And we reflect on how it is relevant to careers today and share lots of ideas and actions that you can use.

So quite excited about today's topic. But Sarah has done a lot of more up-to-date research

around the topic, which is going to inform the discussion. So I will let her tell you what we

are going to be talking about today. So today we're going to be exploring how to kison

your squiggly career.

And for anyone who did business studies of any description at university or college, you probably came across Kaysan because Toyota was always the case study that you were made to learn, which was how to almost like run a production line really efficiently.

And I remember not being super interested in it at the time, if I'm really honest,

and struggling a bit with like, oh, I'm not sure how this is relevant.

It felt very manufacturing-based, I think,

when we first learned about it in a textbook.

I remember thinking, like, Kaisan was about continual improvement

and definitely another toy to think.

And then it was, I think Sarah and I,

because for people who don't know,

Sarah and I went to university together many, many, many years ago.

And I think there was like an operations management module, something like that.

It was. Yeah. And was that where that guy, I know who was a strategy guy. Anyway, operations management. I remember Kaiser and Kohnoff in a little reminiscence. And I remember just in time. Like, you know, last in, first out. Do you remember like LIFO and FIFO? Oh yeah. No. I, yeah. I forgot on that until you said it. There you go. Lifo, Fipo. Last in, first out and first in first out. I think something like that. Which I think has since been applied to like recruitment as a thing to worry about. You know, if you're like, if you're last in,

you'll be first out in a restructure. I think it's been taken to a new context. And like lean, lean production principles, all that kind. I just remember a whole module. I don't think that's that bad 20 years on remembering all of that random stuff in the back of my brain.

Yeah. I hadn't remembered any of it. But so, yeah, I've been doing some digging. And a few things if you are new to Kaizen. So don't be put off by thinking, or I've never studied this before. We will bring you up to speed. And most of what we're talking about today, we're learning for the first time too. So the Japanese, interestingly, see Kaysen as a noun, and it means good change or improvement.

And it's a method that really emphasises doing things incrementally better.

So it's sort of lots of small changes.

And I was reading one example of companies who've implemented this. On average, the people who work there suggest 19 ways that a company could

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