I often look for sports analogies to help you better understand your lean journey and keep it moving in the right direction. This past week, baseball lost one of its greatest players with the passing of Yogi Berra. Although I am a lifelong Red Sox fan, I am writing this post in his memory based on one of Berra’s more famous sayings: “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.”
Reflecting upon various lean journeys I have been involved in, along with lean peer discussions, I firmly believe that lean is also 90% mental and the other half is physical. The 1st challenge of lean is the culture change and keeping the momentum moving. Looking at every work interruption through ‘Kaizen Eyes’ is the mental side, and then moving them through “Plan, Do, Check, Adjust” (PDCA) is more physical than anything else. People tend to want to just fix “it” without truly understanding what “it” is. As we move projects through the PDCA, constantly use mental awareness of team dynamics and motivation zappers in order to keep the momentum.
Understanding the problem is a mix of mental and physical. The mental side of understanding requires you to breakdown the process, step by step, including going to the gemba to seek to better understand. The physical requires you to use lean tools to get to the real root cause. Once the root cause is identified we transition back into the mental by separating ourselves from the current process so we can redevelop and improve upon it. This improvement is often completed by physically using lean tools to develop the future state vision and implementation plan.
For leadership we see the same relationship. Their mental challenge is changing how they interact with the organization by meeting with teams to provide encouragement and support to ensure team success. Their physical component is the gemba walk where they get out to the floor and talk about the real issues and projects underway. And then again they engage the mental side of teams using psychology to keep that “kaizen eyes” culture change moving forward. Finally it’s brought back together by reflecting with other leaders (mental), and taking their own corrective action (physical) to keep the team moving (mental) toward its true north goals.
We can learn a lot from Yogi Berra as we look over his career during which he was a U.S. Navy gunner’s mate, an 18 time MVP and also won 13 championships. He played several positions as a player and as a manager and coach he impacted the lives of many young men. As we all continue on our own lean journeys, let’s continue to learn from Berra and always remember, “You can observe a lot by watching” and “It ain’t over till it’s over.”
