I was interested in the thoughts placed above upon continuous vs continual. My understanding is that the references made to continual and not continuous in the ISO documents are somewhat contradictory to what Deming first suggested with regards the two terms, and that it should also be more in line with the Kaizen approach – combining this with thoughts of Krispin and de Lange in the late 90s is that Continual is non-stop and refers to the PROCESS of improvement, and continuous is complementary to discontinuous or innovative and this refers to the STRUCTURE of improvement – hence continuous is part of continual improvement, as is discontinuous improvement, continual referring to the whole process. Regards. Dr Kevin Owen