Robinson is the principal of Robinson Consulting Group and a participant in the Columbus Foundation cohort engaging with the Columbus' Community Dialogue Policing initiative.
Corporate leaders, at least those who are successful, are always seeking ways to improve their businesses. Those seeking to improve social and civic leaders should take a page from corporate executive, particularly those who practice Lean Six Sigma.
LSS merges the efficiency-focused Lean principles developed by Toyota in the 1940s with the quality-centric Six Sigma strategies introduced by Motorola in the 1980s. This combination aims to eliminate non-value-adding activities in production processes. A key tool in this discipline is Kaizen, a Japanese concept meaning "change for the better," or continuous improvement. Rooted in the principle of small, incremental changes leading to significant improvements over time, Kaizen is instrumental in enhancing productivity and quality.
Typically, business leaders enable subject matter experts to engage in week-long workshops, fostering collaboration to develop process changes that yield cost savings or time efficiencies. Emphasizing teamwork, personal discipline and morale, Kaizen also advocates for quality circles and proactive improvement suggestions.
I am a firm believer in the broader applications of Kaizen, seeing great potential for its principles to be adopted by citizen engineers, extending its impact beyond the corporate world.
The need for citizen engineers is becoming increasingly important in our society. These individuals leverage their technical skills to address social and civic issues, bridging the gap and adapting to societal challenges. Citizen engineers embody the "people power" vital to democratic infrastructure and social uplift. Citizen engineers, equipped with conceptual practices found in Kaizen, can become helpful in effecting change in our nation and beyond. World-class corporations understand that a continuous improvement culture is necessary to contend with new competitors, innovations, disruptions and disruptors. Perhaps it is time that we apply this approach beyond distribution centers and back office functions to communities seeking to design a better future.
The application of Kaizen by citizen engineers for social innovation is rooted in the belief that all areas of life can improve. While Kaizen, in a corporate setting, targets productivity and efficiency, its application in social innovation aims to improve the quality of life in community development and enhance structures. For instance, they can address the challenges of sustainable urban development through the collaboration of entities that often gather together. By applying Kaizen, engineers gradually improve waste management systems, transportation, and energy usage, leading to greener cities.
Additionally, Kaizen could aid in strengthening education systems. Citizen engineers can implement technological solutions to enhance the learning environment incrementally. They can create interactive learning tools, develop systems for efficient knowledge transfer, or even design infrastructure that promotes learning. Over time, these minor improvements can significantly transform the education landscape.
I share in the optimism and power of Kaizen to tackle social inequalities. Citizen engineers can develop and implement solutions that gradually reduce disparities in health care, income and social services, from creating affordable medical devices to developing platforms for job opportunities.
However, Kaizen for social innovation has its challenges. It requires a shift in mindset from quick, radical changes to incremental, continuous improvement. The perspective shift demands patience, commitment, a long-term view of success and most importantly, sustainability. Furthermore, it necessitates understanding of societal issues and the community's involvement in the change process.
An important thread to any successful facilitator of a Kaizen is the spirit of curiosity and effective questioning. It unlocks information and awareness needed for authentic connection. Citizen engineers ought to be adequately trained and supported in using Kaizen with a people-first approach. They need to understand the Kaizen philosophy and methodology and how to apply it in a societal context. They should be encouraged to collaborate with communities, local governments and nonprofit organizations to identify areas that require improvement and implement relevant solutions. The goal is to be a catalyst for the change, simultaneously allowing those organizations to create and own the outcomes that were created.
Kaizen aligns with the ethos of “people power,” empowering individuals to effect change in their communities through continuous, incremental improvements. While it presents particular challenges, citizen engineers can use the Kaizen methodology to contribute significantly to civic and social society with the proper support and experiential environment.
An emergent application of Kaizen to social enterprise can be found in a cohort of community leaders and the Columbus Police Department. CPD's Community Dialogue Policing aims to foster better relationships between police and community members, focusing on open dialogue, understanding and mutual respect. The aim is that, over time, earnest dialogue, deep engagement and cooperative design will lead to incremental, consistent improvements, resulting in a positive shift in community-police relations, thus mirroring Kaizen's ethos of continuous improvement.
The future of social innovation lies in the hands of citizen engineers, a hybrid of two skill sets that have application in a multiplicity of arenas. “ The Medici Effect ” by Frans Johansson makes the argument that key innovations that have impacted our world arose as a result of interconnecting concepts, ideas and products. This cross-pollination of Kaizen framework and cultural awareness could be the answer for sustaining the change that our communities need. With the Kaizen methodology, citizen engineers can take these small steps over time to create a better community, nation and world for all.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.