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Where it comes from.

MyJackfruit stands on a hundred years of one idea: decide what "better" means, measure it, improve one step, and measure again.

  1. 1924 · Farm fields and telephone factories

    It started with statistics, first in farm fields, then in telephone factories. On 16 May 1924, at Western Electric, Walter Shewhart drew the first control chart: a way to tell a real change from noise.

    In 1939 he described a cycle that would outlive him. Specification, production and inspection "must go in a circle instead of in a straight line." It was science, applied to making things. The man who had brought him to lecture, at the US Department of Agriculture, was a young statistician named W. Edwards Deming.

    Black and white portrait of Walter Shewhart in round glasses, a dark suit and a tie.
    Walter A. Shewhart, 1920.
    A drawing of two cycles. Inside, Shewhart's cycle of 1939: specification, then production, then inspection, and back to specification, in a circle. Around it, the same cycle in the words Deming wrote to Tom Gilb in 1991: Plan, then Do, then Study, then Act, and back to Plan.PlanDoStudyActSpecificationProductionInspection
    • Shewhart, 1939
    • Deming, 1991
    The Shewhart cycle, specification → production → inspection, becoming Plan → Do → Study → Act

  2. 1942 · The war years

    When the United States went to war, its factories had to make more, faster, with fewer failures. From July 1942, Deming and his colleagues at Stanford taught Shewhart's methods in short courses for war production, and thousands learned them. The wartime workforce, many of them women working as inspectors, put the methods to work on aircraft, engines and guns. Joseph Juran, who had worked beside Shewhart at Western Electric, served in Washington, running Lend-Lease supplies.

    Colour photograph of a young woman in work gloves and an inspector's armband, checking the end of a bundle of aircraft wiring.
    Woman inspector at Vega Aircraft, Burbank, June 1942.

  3. 1950 · Japan rebuilds

    In July 1950, Deming taught an eight-day course in Tokyo and met the heads of Japan's leading manufacturers. The Deming Prize followed in 1951. Juran lectured in Japan in 1954.

    Japan's engineers and managers proved to be outstanding implementers. They took the methods and applied them with discipline, every day, on every line. At Toyota, Taiichi Ohno built the Toyota Production System, and the word for the habit behind it became known worldwide: kaizen, change for the better, one step at a time. All of it in production.

    Old sepia photograph of W. Edwards Deming lecturing at a desk in Tokyo, a man standing beside him.
    Deming in Tokyo, 1950.
    A Toyoda Type G automatic loom on display in a museum: black iron frame, white cloth rolls and orange belts.
    Toyoda Type G automatic loom, 1924, which stopped itself when something went wrong.

  4. 1970s · Into software

    Tom Gilb, born in California in 1940 and working in Norway since 1958, carried these ideas into software. He showed engineers how to write down what people need as numbers they can check, and called it Planguage, short for Planning Language. His Evo method is, in his own words, "above all, the application of the Shewhart process control cycle." In 1991 Deming wrote to him with the cycle in his own words: Plan, Do, Study, Act.

    Tom Gilb
    Book cover: Tom Gilb, Software Metrics, Studentlitteratur, with an orange diamond pattern.
    Software Metrics (1976) (opens in a new tab)
    Book cover: Tom Gilb, Principles of Software Engineering Management, in yellow and blue.
    Principles of Software Engineering Management (1988) (opens in a new tab)
    Book cover: Tom Gilb, Competitive Engineering, Elsevier, a blue cube with arrows on orange.
    Competitive Engineering (2005) (opens in a new tab)

  5. Value Management Learning Process

    Kai Gilb's Value Delivery Cycle, 2008.
    1. Stakeholders: Identify stakeholders: who and what cares about the outcome?
    2. Values: Value capturing: find and specify, with numbers, the stakeholder values, product values and resource improvements.
    3. Solutions: Solution prioritization: find, evaluate and prioritize the solutions that satisfy the requirements.
    4. Decompose: Evo cycles: break the winning solutions into smaller steps, then package them to deliver the most value.
    5. Develop: Develop the packages that deliver the value.
    6. Deliver: Deliver improved value to the stakeholders. Not always a thing, or code.
    7. Measure: Measure change: how much did the values change?
    8. Learn: Learn and change: learning is defined as a change in behaviour.

  6. 2026 · Into AI

    Now Kai brings the methods into AI. Just as Japan's engineers proved great implementers, so are AI agents: they follow written standards faithfully and tirelessly, every step, every time. That is what Kai-Zen is built on.

    MyJackfruit is Kai's. He designed it, built it and owns it, and he is the primary inventor of the patent-pending Kai-Zen engine, with Tom as co-inventor.

    Jairam and Mira-Bai, Kai's son and daughter, are part of the team.

    Kai Gilb
    The top of a USPTO electronic acknowledgement receipt: application number 19/755,865, receipt date 07/28/2026, the title of invention, System and Method for Multi-Level Value-Driven Delegation, Governance, and Improvement of Generative Artificial Intelligence Agents, and the application type, Utility - Nonprovisional Application.
    Patent application receipt, cropped. The docket number is blurred.

Picture credits

  • Walter A. Shewhart, 1920. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
  • David Bransby, June 1942. U.S. Office of War Information. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-fsac-1a34456.
  • W. Edwards Deming in Tokyo, 1950. Unknown photographer. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
  • Toyoda automatic loom, Type G, 1924. Photo: Morio, CC BY-SA 3.0 (opens in a new tab), via Wikimedia Commons.
  • Book covers © their publishers: Studentlitteratur, Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann.