What Is Yokoten? The Key to Scaling Continuous Improvement

Yokoten: The Key to Scaling Improvement Across Your Company

In this blog, I want to break down one of the most powerful concepts in Lean culture: Yokoten, or horizontal sharing. If you’ve ever wondered why some companies improve rapidly while others stay stuck, the answer often comes down to one thing whether their best ideas stay isolated, or whether they’re shared across the entire organization.

The Foundation: Standards and Stability Before Improvement

Over the years, I’ve worked in two extremes: companies that were so rigid they never allowed meaningful improvement, and companies so chaotic they had no standards at all. Neither environment supports real continuous improvement.
True Kaizen only happens when you have standards clear expectations, visual guides, and stable systems that form the baseline for growth.

At Elevate Construction, LeanTakt, and Lean Built, we maintain all of our standards visually. Everyone knows exactly where to find the current best practice. And because standards are visible and accessible, they become easy to improve. In fact, our team shares one visual standard every day in a WhatsApp group, prompting everyone to refine, clarify, or update it. This daily rhythm creates a culture where improving the standard is just part of the workflow.

But standards mean nothing unless they’re Followed By All (FBA), a concept from Gino Wickman. If a standard exists but nobody knows where to find it or worse, knows it exists but can’t remember what it says it’s not really a standard.

Making Improvement Shareable: The Power of Yokoten

This is where Yokoten comes in. Once someone figures out a better way, the improvement shouldn’t stay isolated it should spread horizontally across the company. Here are two practical ways we make Yokoten happen:

1. Walk Other Projects
   Most of what I learned at the Bioscience Research Laboratory came from walking ahead of schedule projects. I’d observe what they were doing, borrow their best practices, and adapt them. If your team can tour another project every month, you’ll dramatically accelerate learning.
2. Use Before and After Improvement Videos
   Inspired by Paul Akers, our teams create quick before and after improvement videos. These videos circulate company wide, and when an idea raises the minimum standard, we attach that video to the visual standard and update it for everyone.
   This creates a remarkable feedback loop, people see improvements happening daily and become inspired to contribute their own.

Gamification helps too. We often award small prizes for the most impactful improvement of the month or year. People appreciate being acknowledged, and recognition fuels the cultural engine of Kaizen.

Creating a Culture Where Improvements Scale Automatically

The real magic happens when Yokoten becomes a habit. When people proudly share improvements during worker huddles, in WhatsApp chats, or through site tours, your company develops a self propelling improvement culture.

A few things happen naturally:

• Workers get excited when their ideas are shared publicly.
• Other teams adopt improvements immediately instead of reinventing the wheel.
• Everyone begins contributing to a cycle of creativity and refinement.
• Your minimum standard rises steadily without force, resistance, or friction.

This is what continuous improvement is supposed to feel like positive, collaborative, and energizing.

Seeing Yokoten in Action

At the end of this blog, I’m sharing examples of how we create and scale visual standards, what our morning worker huddles look like, and a few improvement videos from my time as a superintendent at DPR. These examples show exactly how Yokoten works in practice and how you can start applying it tomorrow.

If you have questions or want help setting up your own Yokoten system, please reach out. I hope this blog has given you a clear and practical way to boost your Kaizen culture.