In the back office of a small printing business, there’s a table with one short leg. Everyone knows about it. Staff have developed a small ritual: before putting anything heavy down, they lean on the opposite corner. A folded beer mat lived under the leg for a while, until someone moved it. New employees learn about the table the hard way, usually involving coffee.
The table has been wobbling for three years. Fixing it would take about ten minutes.
Most businesses have a dozen of these. A spreadsheet everyone has to fix by hand every Friday. A printer that only works if you open the tray twice. A login nobody remembers, so it gets reset every month. A question every new customer asks because the website doesn’t answer it. None of them is a crisis, which is precisely why they survive. Each one costs a few minutes and a small sigh, repeated week after week.
The idea that a business should improve itself through many small, regular changes has a famous name, kaizen, and a reputation for belonging in car factories rather than small offices. That’s a pity, because it may suit small teams even better.
One Like insight: The problems that cost you most are often the ones that are too small to fix.
Small fixes, enormous totals
Toyota’s Creative Idea Suggestion System is probably the most famous example of continuous improvement in practice, and its numbers are hard to believe at first. The company’s own magazine, Toyota Times, reported that in 2023 employees submitted some 810,000 suggestions, an average of 14.4 per person among plant technical staff. Over seven decades, the system has collected around 50 million.
The interesting detail is what most of those suggestions are like. Rather than grand strategic ideas, most are practical, often modest improvements to the work people do every day: a better position for a tool, a simpler form, a fix for something that keeps going wrong. Toyota Times describes the principle as “no suggestion too trivial”, and the company even runs an award for first- and second-year employees who submit at least three suggestions a month.
It would be easy to dismiss this as something only a giant manufacturer could pull off. But the logic behind it suits small businesses well. Toyota’s system works because the people closest to the work notice the wobbly tables, and they’re encouraged to fix them rather than work around them. In a team of five, those people are everyone, and the distance between noticing a problem and fixing it can be a single conversation.
Why small wins work
There’s a psychological reason small improvements are easier to sustain than big ones. In 1984, the organisational psychologist Karl Weick published an influential paper in American Psychologist called “Small Wins”. His argument was that when problems are framed as huge, people tend to feel overwhelmed and do nothing. Breaking them into smaller, concrete wins makes action feel possible, and each win builds a little momentum and confidence for the next.
That matches the experience of most small-business owners. “Improve our operations” is a project that never quite starts. “Fix the Friday spreadsheet” is something you could do this afternoon. And once the Friday spreadsheet is fixed, the team has a small, visible reminder that annoyances don’t have to be permanent.
Small changes have another advantage: they’re cheap to undo. If a new way of filing invoices turns out to be worse, you switch back and you’ve lost a week, not a quarter. That lowers the stakes of trying, which in turn makes people more willing to suggest ideas in the first place.
[Infographic placement] How small fixes add up. A simple staircase of ten small steps rising from left to right, each labelled with an everyday fix: “Fixed the wobbly table” · “Saved the Friday report template” · “Added FAQs to the booking page” · “Labelled the stock shelves” · “Set up an auto-reply for after-hours enquiries”… At the top: A business that works more smoothly every month. Caption: Toyota’s staff submitted around 810,000 suggestions in 2023. Most were small.
Highlight: “Improve our operations” never starts. “Fix the Friday spreadsheet” could be done this afternoon.
A simple rhythm for small teams
Continuous improvement has gathered plenty of jargon over the years, but its core is a loop most often credited to the quality pioneer W. Edwards Deming: plan, do, study, act. Decide what you’ll change and what you expect to happen. Try it on a small scale. Look at what actually happened. Then keep the change, adjust it or drop it. Healthcare improvement teams around the world use the same loop, usually abbreviated to PDSA, to test changes safely before rolling them out.
For a small business, the loop can be wrapped into a short weekly habit:
- Keep an annoyance list. A shared note, a whiteboard or a page in a notebook where anyone can jot down something that wastes time, confuses customers or simply irritates them. No idea is too small.
- Pick one each week. In a fifteen-minute slot, choose one item, agree who will fix it and what “fixed” will look like.
- Check it next week. Did the change work? Is anyone still leaning on the opposite corner of the table? Keep, adjust or drop.
- Celebrate the boring wins. A quick mention when something gets fixed reminds everyone the list is worth adding to.
The weekly rhythm matters more than the size of any single fix. As we saw in Why Good Ideas Die in Small Businesses, improvements tend to disappear when nobody owns them and nothing has a date attached. A small, regular slot gives every fix both.
Where to start
The best first step is simply noticing. For one week, ask everyone in the business, including yourself, to write down every small thing that slows them down or makes them sigh. Don’t judge or prioritise yet. Just collect. Most teams are surprised by how long the list gets, and by how many items take minutes rather than days to fix.
Then ask the question Toyota has built a culture around: who is best placed to fix this? Often it’s the person who noticed it. Giving them permission, and a little time, is usually all it takes.
A few questions can help:
- What do we work around every day without thinking about it?
- Which customer questions come up so often that we could answer them in advance?
- Who in the team notices problems first, and do they feel able to fix them?
- When did we last fix something just because it annoyed us?
Which brings us back to the printing business and its three-year wobble. Once someone finally fixes the leg, the team will probably forget the table ever wobbled. That’s the quiet reward of continuous improvement: a business that gets a little easier to work in every week, mostly without anyone noticing why.
Sources
- Toyota Times, “Making Work More Fun and Fruitful: Toyota’s Creative Idea Suggestion System”, 31 October 2024. Source of the 2023 suggestion figures, the 50 million total and the rookie award.
- Karl E. Weick, “Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems”, American Psychologist 39(1), 1984 (DOI 10.1037/0003-066X.39.1.40).
- W. Edwards Deming’s plan-do-study-act cycle, widely used in quality and healthcare improvement (general reference).
