Improving the business of life
WARNING: The following content contains graphic images of a baby eating dinner, which may be disturbing to anyone planning to some day start a family. Reader discretion is advised.
After nearly 2 months, Leanable Moments are back, taking you inside my family life to show you how I apply Lean problem solving to take the waste out of life. Today’s Leanable Moment examines one of the most frustrating experiences in the life of being a parent: feeding solid foods to a six month old baby.
I recently had the honor of appearing on the Gemba Academy podcast hosted by Ron Pereira. In the 40 minute interview, Ron, himself a father of 6, and I discuss the challenges of raising a big family and how Lean thinking and continuous improvement can be applied in home and in family life to conquer the chaos.
After taking a deep dive into my household, we also discuss some more traditional Lean-related topics such as:
You can click on the player below to listen to the interview in your browser:
Or you can listen to the interview through the Gemba Academy blog or via the Gemba Academy podcast on Stitcher or iTunes.
Show notes, containing links to pictures of our Lean @ Home systems as well as everything else that we discussed during the show, can be viewed here.
I’d love to know your thoughts on the interview! Please post your comments below, or contact me on twitter via @TheKaiZone.
And if you want more great Lean @ Home content, or have questions about any of the visual management tools featured in the show notes or on this blog, please checkout the website of my very LEANable Wife at ASimplyEnchantingLife.com.
“So, you really want to know what it’s like to raise three children?”
I did. This man was speaking from experience.
“Let me try to put it in terms you’ll understand. Pretend you are playing defense in the NFL. When you have one kid, it’s like playing zone coverage. It’s easy. Most of the time, you get a break. You just keep your head on a swivel and stay ready in case the kid enters your zone.”
“Now with two kids, you have to play man coverage. You don’t get a break, but it’s manageable. You and your wife each take one kid and you just follow them around wherever they go.”
“With three kids, forget about it. You’re only hope is the prevent defense. Your outnumbered, so all the little stuff, you leave it go. You just put your heels on the goal line, and you pray that they don’t burn you for the big one. That’s what it’s like to raise three kids.”
Not only was this man a mentor to me, but he was also a father of three himself. I took his words seriously . . . or so I thought.
Despite all of our best efforts, our family simply was not prepared for the chaos that a third child would bring to our household and to our family life. But while the frenzy could have very easily pulled us apart at the seams, with a little bit of Lean and a lot of love, we managed to get ourselves back on the right path. And in doing so, we now live, laugh, learn and love more than we ever have before.
Although I’ve been writing about how we have applied Lean principles at home for quite some time, I’ve never told the whole story of how or why this way of thinking came to be in our household. What follows is the story of how my family started its Lean journey, and the three principles that you too can use to transform your family and achieve your ideal life.
My wife and I started dating when we were in junior high school. By the time baby #3 arrived, we had been together for 16 years. Having literally grown up together, we thought that we would be able to tackle whatever life threw at us. We were wrong, at least for a little while.
With a third (sleep-deprived and screaming) child in the house, every day was a blur. It was especially hard for my wife who was home full-time with three kids, all of which were age 3 or younger. This became our family life. Simply getting through each day without significant injury or property damage, felt like a miracle. We were exhausted. Our stress levels skyrocketed. And we often took out our frustrations on the kids. No one was happy. This was not how we always pictured our big, happy family.
Already by the time our little man turned two months old, it was clear that the ways in which we were running the household were simply not going to work anymore. Not that we had any clue what or how to do to make it better. But then one day, maybe it was my wife’s brilliance finally shining out through the fog of sleeplessness, and maybe it was divine intervention, but one conversation would change everything.
Drained from another long day, my wife and I collapsed sat down on the sofa one evening with a couple large bottles of wine strong cups of coffee. Our gazes met each other with that zombie-like emptiness to which we had grown more than familiar. “Teach me about Lean,” she said flatly. (What???) Did the wine coffee kick in earlier than usual? That was not what I was expecting.
Over many years, I had developed quite an appetite for the study and practice of Lean thinking. However, save for a few nifty little tools here-and-there, that hunger never really carried over into our home life. Wanting to seize the opportunity, I sprang into action and did what any good continuous improvement professional would . . . I grabbed the kids’ dry erase board and a pack of markers and turned the living room into my own personal process improvement pulpit.
For the next few nights, fueled by a steady supply of caffeine and with the scent of dry erase markers in hanging the air, I taught my wife everything I knew about Lean. But, this was not your typical introduction to Lean class. I taught Lean how I had always dreamed of teaching it. I didn’t turn to a pre-made slide deck; I sketched everything as we talked. We didn’t focus on tools; we honed in on the underlying concepts, principles and mindsets. And not a single word of Japanese was spoken (okay, except for kaizen, but that’s practically an English word by now).
To her credit, my wife was a quick study. I knew that she “got it” on the third night when she made the comment, “so, Lean is really more about the people and the culture than anything else, isn’t it?” I’d never been so proud . . .
We spent the week taking a deep dive into the concepts of Lean thinking and talking about how to apply them at home, to get back to the family life that we had always dreamed of. We cut through most of the meaningless buzzwords and clichés that accompany the typical Lean training, and we focused on the critical few ideas that we could apply immediately.
By the end of the week, we had developed a plan based on three Lean principles for how we would conquer the chaos that had run rampant through our home. And do you know what? The plan worked. It didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t easy. But slowly and with a significant amount of effort from everyone in the family, it worked.
After a few months, there were clear signs that our happy family was back and better than ever. We had less stress, we had more energy, and we looked more forward to waking up in the morning than we did to going to bed at night. We even started dreaming about baby #4!
Was it perfect? Absolutely not. But it was clear that we had made significant strides toward our happy family ideals in just a few short months.
The three principles that guide our family make up the foundation of what I feel Lean is all about. They are simple concepts, which means that any family can understand them and put them into practice. However, simple does not necessarily mean easy. Real continuous Improvement is difficult, especially in the beginning. It requires that we change the way we think and the things we do. It’s also not a quick fix; there are no shortcuts on the journey. It requires commitment over the long-haul and persistence in the face of obstacles and setbacks.
But if you are able to put these three principles into practice, commit to them over the long-haul, and persevere in the face of the obstacles and setbacks, I truly believe that you and your family will be on the path to your ideal life.
What is your True North? True North is your ideal life. True North is your ultimate destination. Like a far off compass bearing, it is what provides us with a direction on our journey. Everything that we do, and everything that we attempt to achieve, should take us closer to our True North destination. And on the occasions when we stray from the path, it is by heading for our True North that we are able to get back on track. Although we may never reach True North, the main point is that every day our actions are focused on getting us a little bit closer to our ideal life.
With the frantic pace of modern life, it’s very easy – and very typical – for us to wander through life without direction. We make decisions and take actions without an ultimate goal to provide us with guidance on our journeys. Each step takes us in its own, random direction; the unfortunate result is that we look back on our lives and realize that we didn’t get very far. Even worse, in the context of a family, not only do we fail to make much progress, but each individual heads off in a unique direction, loosening the bonds of the family with each step.
My family has direction and a greater purpose because we have defined our True North ideals. Every day, we take steps – some big, but mostly small – to get us closer to our vision of ideal. In futures posts, I will share with you some of the details behind our True North. However, know that True North will be different for every individual and every family. There is no right or wrong answer to the question; that the question has been answered, and that the commitment to the answer has been made, is all that matters.
Life should be more than just a random sequence of steps. Each and every person should walk with a purpose . . . with a direction. Families need to stick together, until the time is right for the children to find their own calling. It all starts with – and ends with – the pursuit of True North.
What is preventing you and your family from living your ideal life? On the journey to True North, there are countless obstacles, pitfalls and roadblocks that stand in our way. Some we see coming; most, however, we choose not to see until it’s too late and we’re forced to take action.
Life’s problems are all around us. In this fast-paced, high-stress, five-cups-of-coffee-before-lunch world, our natural inclination is to put off to tomorrow that which is not going to burn our figurative houses to the ground today. Hope springs eternal that if we simply ignore our problems for long enough, maybe, just maybe, they will disappear.
Our conventional strategy is a farce. Grounded in blind hope and self-deception, the wait-and-see approach only compounds the magnitude of our problems over time. Real problems do not simply vanish; rather, when given time, they grow like a snowball tumbling down a mountainside of fresh powder. To prevent an avalanche, we need to eliminate our problems when they are still small and manageable. And because small problems are hard to find, we must deliberately take action to seek them out and make the invisible problems visible to us.
We are able to perceive a problem only when there is a gap between reality and our expectation. The reason that we struggle to identify problems in general is because, over the course of any given day in our lives, we set very few expectations for ourselves. Take tomorrow for instance. When you wake up, how much milk should there be in the refrigerator? How long should you be dedicating to the big project due next quarter? What chores should you get done before you go to sleep? How much money should you have stashed away for your child’s college education?
Without setting expectations, there is simply no way of knowing whether or not you have a problem. When will you find out? When you run out of milk, fall irreparably behind on the big project, forget to wash that outfit you were hoping to wear tomorrow, and take out a 2nd mortgage to pay the tuition bills. Small problems become BIG problems.
In our household, we have taken great lengths to set expectations for our days. From visual daily schedule boards for the kids, picture-based checklists for routine tasks (see below for examples), and visual activity planning, we manage our household in a way that makes small problems visible before they become big problems.
In future posts, we’ll give you a behind-the-scenes look at how we develop, create and utilize the concepts of visual management in our household to bring the invisible into light.
True North represents our ideal family life, and making problems visible tells us what is preventing us today from achieving those future aspirations. The question then becomes, how do you close the gaps between where you are now, and where you want to be in life?
When we identify an obstacle on our path to True North (and there will be many), we have a choice to make. Very simply, we can choose to go around the problem and deviate from our ultimate goal in the process, or we can choose to overcome the obstacle and to continue on our journey.
Solving life’s problems is not easy; it requires a substantial investment of time and energy, especially in the beginning before the required behavior and thought patters become habitual. It can, and will feel unmanageable at times. However, by recognizing each problem as an opportunity to remove another barrier from life’s path, we can draw on those negative emotions and use them as fuel to keep us motivated and engaged in our efforts.
In our household, the commitment to continuous improvement touches everyone in the family. As parents, teaching our kids the problem solving mindset is one of our chief priorities. We want to encourage our children at a young age to see problems not as a source of shame to be avoided, but as an opportunity to take pride in their achievements. Therefore, when they make an honest mistake, rather than resort to discipline, we partner with our children to solve the problem so that we all can learn from it. These Leanable Moments not only improve our parenting abilities, but also develop a skill in our children that is critical in all walks of life.
Keep an eye out for additional Leanable Moments in the near future to see some fun and creative solutions to common household problems.
What will life hold for you and for your family? Will you reach your True North, or will you get sidetracked and wander through life without a clear direction or greater purpose? Will you reach for your dreams, or will you live with the regret of what could have been? We may never know the answers to these questions.
However, if we create our own Personal True North, if we overcome the hidden obstacles that hold us back, and if we commit to continually improving our lives, little-by-little, day-by-day, we also cannot tell all of the great things that we can achieve in life.
How can you start your journey? Over the coming weeks, we will take a deeper dive into the three principles, helping you to create a plan to incorporate these concepts into your daily life. We will also look at more examples that show how my family has put the principles into practice on our journey.
The easiest way to keep for you to stay up-to-date with the latest information is to get each post sent directly to your inbox by using the subscribe button above.
And if you know others who may benefit, please share this post with others by using the sharing buttons at the end of this post; the more people that I can reach, the closer that I get to my own personal True North.
And if you enjoyed this post, or have questions about the visual management tools we use in our home, do check out my very Leanable Wife’s blog at ASimplyEnchantingLife.com
Guess what, KaiZone Community? You emailed, clicked and commented . . . and I took note! You said, “make The KaiZone more interactive!” Done. You said, “Leanable Moments are a hit. Give me more!” You got it. You said, “Your articles are too long! It’s a blog, not a novel!” My bad. I’ll keep it short and sweet . . . at least for today.
The number one request that I’ve received since starting The KaiZone is to share the form – known in Lean organizations as an A3 report – which I use for my Leanable Moments series of posts. If you are not familiar with the term, the A3 report is the primary vehicle used to teach and practice the problem solving methodology within a Lean organization. For a much more detailed overview of the A3 management process, I highly recommend that you read the book, Managing to Learn by John Shook and Jim Womack. Alternately, head over to YouTube and check out the terrific A3 overview videos from Karen Martin or from Gemba Academy.
Now, you can make your own Leanable Moments, and start eliminating the waste from your lives, using the free problem solving A3 templates located on the new Free Downloads page. To download a copy, simply click on the text links above the image to open the file in the .pdf format. On the page, you will find two different A3 report templates. The Problem Solving A3 Template has been designed for you to practice the Lean problem solving methodology on the problems that you encounter in your everyday life. The second was inspired by my previous post, Leanable Moment #2: Problem Solving Skills for Your Children. You can use the Problem Solving with Kids A3 Template to practice and to develop much needed problem solving skills with your children or students.
I started The KaiZone with the purpose of helping others to bring Lean thinking into their business and personal lives. I know firsthand the power of problem solving and my primary motivation is to develop The KaiZone into a platform that helps you to continually eliminate the things that get in the way of your happiness and your success. To encourage you to start your own Lean journey, I am announcing the official kickoff to the ‘Make Your Own Leanable Moment’ contest. The rules are simple:
Please share the link to the contest with anyone who may be interested in developing the skills needed to improve their business success or personal happiness. Organizations that are beginning their Lean journey can also use it as an opportunity to have some fun while getting practice at problem solving.
If you’ve never completed an A3 report, here are three tips for getting the most out of the problem solving process and for maximizing your learning potential:
If you have any questions about the contest, please feel free to post them in the comments section below, or use the Contact the KaiZone link at the top of the page. Good luck!
Leanable Moments take you inside my home life to show you how I apply Lean thinking to real-world problems. Each Leanable Moment is presented in A3 format – simply click the image to enlarge – and includes discussion focusing on the finer points of the problem solving process – the type of things they don’t necessarily teach you in Lean training! Each discussion will conclude with a summary of key lessons learned, going beyond the boundaries of just one problem to take the waste out of life.
I will not soon forget the roller coaster ride that was the year 2013 for me. Suffice it is to say that it had its share of ups: my wife and I welcomed our third child to the world and I changed companies to take a major step forward in my career; and downs: I’m commuting 60 miles every day into Northern New Jersey due to a change in job location, and I spent 6 months recovering from a minor knee operation due to an allergic reaction and an infection. When the December holidays finally allowed for some much needed relaxation, I took the time to reflect on 2013. Despite the peaks and valleys, I was proud for all that my family and I had accomplished in 2013 and the outlook for 2014 seemed bright. Then I looked in the mirror.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, the bulbous face staring back dictated to me the novella of my 2013 in an instant. I invested a great deal of energy throughout the year in managing through the seemingly constant change. Unbeknownst to me until that moment, the price I paid was my health. Fortunately, the approaching New Year provided just the impetus I needed to set things in a different direction. Unfortunately, of those people who commit to a New Year’s resolution, only 8% reach their goals. For the non-statisticians out there, those aren’t very good odds!
Whatever I was going to do, I knew it had to be different than the way most people approach their New Year’s resolution. But how? How would I start to understand the underlying causes of my poor health? How would I set meaningful goals that would keep me on the path to my true north destination? How would I develop habits of wellness and commit to a long-term healthy lifestyle? Exactly how does someone who preaches the value of Lean thinking for a living – and not to mention operates a Lean blog purely as a hobby – attempt to improve his health? Good guess!
In the above A3, you’ll find the story of how I applied Lean thinking to set the foundation for a long-term healthy lifestyle, using a simple strategy to add years to my life with minimal effort.
<WARNING! Awful cliché approaching!> You could say, I used Lean to get lean!
I warned you . . .
With the growing pains of a new job, nearly two-and-a-half hours of daily commuting time and three children under the age of four, the operative word for my wellness strategy would be: SIMPLE SIMPLER SIMPLEST. Because of my current lifestyle, I needed to challenge myself to define the simplest possible approach for improving my health, allowing me to meet my goals with minimal additional effort on my part. Any strategy that required a significant outlay of time, money or effort would – simply – not succeed.
I started by doing some soul searching to better define what healthy really meant to me. I was able to boil my personal wellness needs down to three priorities:
On 29-Dec-2013, I recorded the baseline for each of my targeted metrics. My very own current condition put into perspective exactly how bad my health truly had become. For my height, my starting weight of 204.3 pounds and 31% body fat put me in the overweight category, on the verge of obesity. My strength had been reduced significantly since I remembered from my college days, with a one-rep max bench press of only 135 pounds . However, of particular concern was my blood pressure. Three readings averaged out to 140/86, which translates to a cardiovascular state somewhere between prehypertension and stage 1 hypertension. I was at serious risk for developing heart disease later in life.
To see the bigger picture, however, I placed my data into a life expectancy calculator developed by the University of Pennsylvania. Living well into my 80s has always been a given in the back of my mind; the data, however, predicted otherwise. My life expectancy was a mere 78.75 years.
To simplify the analysis, I didn’t evaluate every potential cause for my lack of wellness. Instead, I focused the analysis on just the critical few factors. It was no surprise that at a high level, my unhealthy behavior was rooted in a failure to eat properly and a lack of exercise. However, I was surprised to learn that the same cycle of events was at the foundation of both issues. After several days of self-observation, I learned that I tended to eat poorly – in terms of quality and quantity of food – at times of the day when I was feeling particularly tired or stressed. I knew I was eating the wrong kinds of food, but I chose to anyway because I sought the comfort of food to take my mind off of the negative feelings I was experiencing in that moment. It was as if the stress of life depleted the energy that I needed to make better decisions about the foods that I ate.
Similarly, stress and lack of energy became the scapegoat for my lack of exercise. I knew that I should be exercising regularly; however, when the opportunity presented itself, I would choose not to and convince myself that I was either too busy or that I didn’t have the energy. I didn’t have the energy because I was not exercising; I was not exercising because I didn’t have the energy. It was a vicious cycle.
Why wasn’t I eating well? Why wasn’t I exercising more? The underlying root causes in both cases were strikingly similar. Major life changes in the past year had significantly increased the level of stress in my life, which sapped my willpower and led me to make poor health decisions. <conclusion>
Experience told me that I needed to address the root cause of the problem in order to improve my situation. However, my strategy for improvement required that I identify the simplest possible strategy for improving my health. So, when I first started to look for opportunities to address the root cause of the problem, my increased stress levels, I had difficulty finding non-complex solutions. The stresses had accumulated due to major life changes, like a new job and a growing family; short of packing up and moving the family closer to work– anything but a simple solution – I needed to look for other plans of attack.
Instead, I considered a different component of the root cause statement: ways in which I could improve the choices I made in relation to food and exercise. Initially, improving my willpower to make better health decisions seemed as big of a challenge as reducing my stress; certainly, it did not seem a simple solution could be effective. That is, until I researched the topic by reading the book The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal. Two very important pieces of information about willpower ultimately allowed me to identify a very simple solution to my poor health decisions:
Making bad health decisions is obviously bad for our health. But by resisting temptation and making good health choices, we strain our willpower “muscle”, making it more likely that we will eventually give in to our cravings. It’s no wonder that most attempts to become healthy fail over time! So how did I overcome my limited ability to resist making bad decisions? By simplifying. Instead of attempting to improve my willpower and rely on good decision making, I created a system in which I eliminated the decisions and the anticipation altogether. I created standardized work for a healthy lifestyle.
Each day, I greet the morning with a green smoothie, which I prepared fresh the previous evening. Mid-morning, I snack on a stash of organic nuts and dried fruits that I maintain in a convenient location to keep my energy high until the ding on my phone reminds me it’s time for my noon workout. That is, the workout I blocked off on my calendar, just like the countless meetings that I can’t seem to avoid. I follow the gym with a pre-made salad topped with grilled chicken or sushi if I’m feeling exotic. A piece of fresh fruit mid-afternoon tides me over until dinner, which has been scheduled and prepared ahead of time by my wife. Soon, it’s time for bed and the start of a new day. Time to repeat the cycle all over again. And again. And again.
Standardization has nearly eliminated the temptations that previously drove me to eat poorly and to skip the gym. Healthy habits are now no more a choice for me than getting dressed or taking a shower. I do not question whether I can squeeze them into a busy day and I do not look to substitute less healthy activities in their place. They are, simply, what I do as part of my day. And because I no longer rely on willpower to overcome bad decisions, my defenses against an infrequent craving are much stronger, and my commitment does not waver over time.
Am I perfect? No. I am still human after all. I still have an occasional treat that wouldn’t exactly be considered healthy. The major difference is now I choose to do so because I want to, not because I have to.
Thanks to Lean thinking, and in particular the rigorous pursuit of simplicity, I am living a truly healthy lifestyle for the first time in my life. But don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at the data:
The weight loss of 17.3 pounds does not tell the whole story. Based on the reduction in body fat from 31% to 22%, I’ve actually lost 22.2 pounds of fat and gained 4.9 pounds of lean mass.
The increase in muscle has driven an even greater increase in strength, as I have already exceeded my year-end goal in the bench press by 20 lbs. I’ve even been forced to increase my year-end goal from 185 pounds to 250 pounds.
The improved diet and frequent exercise also delivered a significant reduction in my blood pressure, bringing me down well into the healthy range.
Of all the numbers, however, the change in Life expectancy was by far the most impactful to me. With the simple changes I have been able to make over just the last 3 months, I have added the equivalent of 7.5 years on to my life!
To ensure that I continue to make progress towards my goals, I check the status of my personal metrics on a weekly basis: every Saturday morning before breakfast. Moreover, as a means of holding myself accountable, I will provide quarterly updates here on TheKaiZone.com .
Have you solved a problem in a unique or innovative way that you would like to contribute to Leanable Moments? Simply click here or use the Contact the KaiZone link at the top of the page and tell me about it!