Build Endurance with Kaizen

Developing and implementing strategies to improve your performance often requires more than just hard work. Carefully scaffolding support systems and procedures into your business is fundamental to enduring in complex and changing environments. One of the signatures of a great system is endurance. Endurance is a quality, not a skill. It's not acquired or applied but surfaces from a practice of many adaptations. Developing the right practice requires you to implement and commit to specific protocols, skill development, and methodology across the operation. With time, a stong system will make your business agile enough to take on new tasks with minimal adoption cost, intuitively tackle unexpected challenges without destabilizing structure or compromising quality. Once you commit to the importance of having a compass by which you navigate it's time to decide how you want to build and manage it.

My personal experience working for a small technology manufacturer and later an enormous global brand exposed me to traditional forms of operational models, manufacturing facilities, marketing, sales, change management and customer care. Today, as a small business owner through practice and research I am drawn to the method called Kaizen. Kaizen is a Japanese business model that distributes continual incremental improvement across the entire organization regardless of title, role or responsibility. Most notably is the application of Kaizen at Toyota, a car manufacturer that is now most recognized for its quality and reliability. As opposed to many traditional business models for change management, Kaizen has the power to fundamentally transform the product and the people it is developing. It focuses on optimizations of many small and manageable improvements on a consistent but less structured or periodized basis. Like Six Sigma it seeks opportunities to improve in areas that are often marginalized and overlooked and can make an impact on even the most productive assembly line or platform. The technique, however, is more fluid and organic. This is not a method you apply but more of cultivation of enablement and responsibility you embrace as continuous shared learning that's never complete. In my most recent experience and experiments at EvoStream, I've arrived at the conclusion that it can drastically improve the resourcefulness of small teams and enhance the experience of the participants as much as the product they are delivering. In a service-oriented business, this is incredibly powerful as the people you develop eventually transform into your customer-facing product and brand.

For those of us that have worked for a large corporation over an extended period of time, we often notice that most initiatives eventually curve in on themselves and not for lack of resources, money or desire. Whether it's a monthly sales target, the quarterly cycle of reporting or annual kickoff, years can pass, new products launch, leaders come and go with no fundamental lasting change. With the size of these larger companies of course often brings leveraged resources and to be fair when you have to borrow a lot of money you have to prepare for thorough oversight. Unfortunately, these obligations don't invite transparency as they are intended. They are the water on seeds that grow into robust facades of integrity, stability all reinforced by a rigid structure. It's complex and often unavoidable to some degree depending on whether it's public, regulated or subsidized. Fortunately, in our small business, the lack of brick and mortar, and outside resources forces us to be more efficient when building processes. From an operations standpoint, I am relieved of many of the obligations of traditional models. This leaves room for more creativity and ultimately new discoveries whether it be recruiting new talent, seeking future opportunities, identifying weaknesses or toying around with principles of Kaizen. As we find ourselves nearly 10 years into our evolution as a service company, I have been challenging myself to recount how we arrived in a place of balanced momentum. The interesting thing about Kaizen is the tracking of the steps it takes to succeed is difficult because the path is not linear or predefined. Forecasting the future is less about being able to see what's around the corner than letting go of predictions and focusing on readiness. You don't measure success with landmark wins and revenue targets but more because you feel agile and responsive. You sense it after walking into a meeting or presentation feeling totally prepared by the subtle inputs and adjustments your teams been tending to for you. So recounting the lessons requires a lot of thought. Nowhere do I have more time to think than when I am on the trails running. During the last several years I have been on an athletic journey towards becoming a long-distance runner. Through this experience I found many answers starting to crystalize every time I felt as though I'd reached a plateau or setback and needed to call upon a positive experience in a business where I may have been able to overcome similar limitations.

One of the lessons I've learned as a runner was the importance of hiring a good coach. Every time I succeeded in growing my business it was not because I was required to do more. It was ironically because I asked myself to do less and trust others. Mentors, advisors and of course the team I was building were always whom I called upon when I needed help. Distributing responsibility in others despite our innate desire to make all of the recommendations from self-mastery or wisdom is important and fundamental to employing Kaizen. We must admit as leaders our perspective is limited, even skewed and trusting your gut on every decision can create bias. When I found myself struggling to improve in running or shoot for greater distances I was able to recognize I needed help. At work, it had always been through the unique vantage point of my counterparts and employees that we hit our targets with accuracy. Alignment pulls in measurements from multiple angles. Often times I had to be willing to accept a tip or feedback from a lost prospect at work or competitor in a race. So recently I decided it was time to get a few new coaches. One for LinkedIn marketing and the other for running. In these relationships, it is not that either perspective is better or worse but that both are needed in unison for clarity. When you look out of one eye you can't see distance well, speed is hard to judge and light can be disturbing but when both are eyes open and focused on the same object things become more clear and observations turn out to be accurate. I also realized clarity is not useful if you can't improve aperture and capture things that would otherwise fall into gaps or hide in the peripheral. With a coach, you can absorb more and have help analyzing inputs. Like sifting for gold it leads to new discoveries and as these doors open for you it's very exciting. This re-energizes you which is important in lengthy and tedious pursuits. Discovery and curiosity are ingredients you want to feed your business culture to have endurance.

Soon I started to notice some other powerful byproducts of this more inclusive strategy. When I empower every member of the team to contribute to say a small change in the tools or process they use to complete a task, each person developed a heightened level of cross-functional awareness outside of their immediate function. Individuals started to seek and find feedback loops of accountability amongst peers with opposing or supporting functions. Typically we only find these static channels wired between management and operators. These loops become the first signs of circuity as we wire the nervous system of our business through Kaizen. All of a sudden the sharing of responsibility gradually depreciates the perceived benefits of hierarchy that are actually taxing to the system and individuals over time. Instead, we've replaced pseudo structures with a sense of community to create stability. Since then, peer recognition has become increasingly important and top-down target incentives less meaningful. What's also great is that the drive for reinforcement from your team creates a natural form of regular healthy inspection as opposed to probing and interference from a supervisor. Again, this shed some weight off me as a manager and helped build another interesting healing quality to our emerging business system.

Similarly, in my running, I find getting an experts perspective, provides clarity around what is working and what's not. There is an immediate sense of accountability which really helps when my schedule or travel has challenged me to get my training completed.

I'm also figuring out as I slowly log my work there is an improvement and I am adapting to higher intensity runs and cross-training that incremental is getting me past what I assumed were physical limitations as I had just turned 40. The methods for this and other discoveries in my endurance training was starting to take on many of the same characteristics as the Kaizen approach I was reflecting on in business during my long runs. I remember now when I first started and became obsessed with exploring every available efficiency across my training, technique, diet, and recovery. I knew this was extremely important but was overwhelmed by the pure load of the effort I was already making during workouts to focus on some of the nuances of the sport. Patience was the ingredient I needed and it came again from an outside source. One day a neighbor who was very experienced in ultramarathons and Spartan races said Stephen becoming an endurance athlete takes years if not decades. You need patience more than anything. The same is true with Kaizen and business development. Too much too soon and you won't see adoptions. You can't find every issue and repair them all at once. As a manager, I needed to develop an ability to resist coming over the top of an employee when I noticed an error and find a creative way to get them to see it for themselves. The ability to suspend action and be observant but reserved I found was another skill I'd need for endurance in both endeavors.

In team sports, you have a clear delineation between coach and player. In individual performance ports and endurance racing events, a team is often not required to complete so you can forget the building one. Having always competed on teams I found myself a bit lost and less organized and lonely than I imagined when I hit the trails. I had very little community and input. With experience and once I proved I was committed to the years of training ultrarunning would require I was able to understand and absorb the research, I was doing better and outsource specific expertise required to figure out lingering problems with technique or injuries. The body I was building started to adapt, my senses were becoming more accurate and I could recover much quicker. The self-healing feedback loop I'd described in business was developing and leaving less on my shoulders to worry about.

Initially competing in some shorter races, revealed large gaps amongst seemingly evenly physically equipped competitors. In speaking with other runners I found these people had found ways to enhance their overall awareness of their race pace and body. At elite athlete levels, marginal differences of 2-3% can equate to drastic differences in where you place on race day. At amateur and recreational levels it would seem less important to make marginal improvements but what I've overlooked is how planning out the race, listening acutely to your body throughout, leveraging the distance and duration can be a huge advantage for aging or less gifted athletes. In a 100 mile race shaving off 10 seconds from your average mile time and 1 minute from 15 aid stations will yield a significant result. Do that year over year and it's impressive. Clearly optimizations and patience were creating different athletes all together not just talent or physicalities. Tough to swallow because what that really translates to in competition is that you got outworked and you need to work even harder to get better so you're not off the hook because you were not gifted with talent. The harsh reality is that it could take me dozens of micro-adjustments in training, technique, and fuel to grab each efficiency but I have plenty of time to explore and implement them since this was becoming a life long endeavor with thousands of hours of training to figure it out. When you shift your mindset to the long game it's easier to think of your business or body as laboratories where we can do inconsequential experiments all day without sacrificing our goals. Approaching it with curiosity and flexibility makes it much more interesting and leveraging the compound interest of every small contribution over time will give you the edge to distance yourself from the pack.

Perhaps it sounds counterintuitive but for me, the most opportune time to make changes or experiment is on the fly when you encounter some minor twinges or challenges. Small setbacks whether it be an operational gap, lost sale or soreness when pushing your body come with the territory and can't be avoided entirely if you're striving for excellence and growth in a challenging endeavor. In fact, they are necessary and being reactive is not always a bad thing. It's important to understand that being reactive doesn't define you as unprepared. Of course, change seems easier for leadership to recognize periodically because it allows for more data to accumulate and be organized but if you have ever have had a major injury in a sport you quickly appreciate how easy it would have been to improve technique when you could move your body vs. when you are trying to rebuild mobility from scratch. These types of interruptions are major setbacks and can take a year to get back to the form you left behind. It makes sense then why companies emphasize regularly planned interruptions in the form of quarterly reviews, where a stage is set for forecasting, reporting, and new proposed strategies. The challenge with these predictable well-organized schedules is that the planning and gravitas around these events adds a ton of work and gives a false impression that everything can be fixed at one time and action can be suspended prior. Amidst all the fuss around reporting, prep and numbers these daily opportunities to tackle small changes in the system start to appear more overwhelming than they are and are set aside. This is a signal that the people are overwhelmed by the system itself and becoming desensitized. This malaise leaves them unable to seek and discover threats and opportunities deep inside the operation. It can become so bad that they can't even address an otherwise obvious gap or red flag. By the time analysis is done at the next planned interval or milestones like annual reviews, board meetings or expansion planning a small but necessary change can become overwhelmingly complex. In reality, accumulation is a key principle to this cyclical approach. Statistics need sample size for the employees responsible for preparing the intel or implementing a change to have an analysis considered qualified or a change approved. Stressed and seeking leadership approval workers then shift reward systems and true employee buy-in requires adding incentives. Of course, those need to be growth-oriented with hard targets or they won't be funded. The momentum being created in this model is very inconsistent. When the system is not in rhythm and there are too many spikes it's a poor time to execute on challenging tasks. In fact, there is a method of endurance training that takes into account HRV a tool many of the latest smartwatches incorporate. Heart Rave Variability measures the consistency of beats which give trainers feedback about the readiness of the nervous system, not just the muscle to do more work. In business if everyone is stressed they being to desensitize and become poor at identifying issues. The system starts to find ways to be more efficient and slow down production. In Kaizen, our goal is to increase the sensitivity of workers and in turn their alertness to problems.

Typically, the only way traditional business models handle the fatigue is with luring reward trips or indulgent happy hours or holiday parties where everyone can relax and restore themselves. The results are quite the opposite. During my first ultra-marathon, I found that at the aid stations which are pitched about every 6 miles the elite athletes have grabbed all of the best gels and good snacks having reached them well in advance of the rest of the pack. By the time I'd arrived everyone else is chatting and deliberating about the next 6 miles. Some people are checking their splits and others are vigorously stretching, looking through their bags or overindulging on the junk food. For me, it is not exactly the best place to regroup and calibrate. I realized relying on these pitstops for replenishment was foolish and reminded me a lot of my experience at the overhyped business events described above. Fortunately, I had brought all of my own supplies carefully packed by my wife and read a trusty old field guide to prepare me for proactive hydration and a schedule of doing regular running check-ins on every body part that could start to fail or suffer. I found like in business it's actually easier to adjust a bit here and there when we have momentum and the gears spinning with some grease in them. All you need to do is develop a regular grooming habit during training runs where subtle sensory inputs can interpret to identify and tune your body on the go. In business, this can be done more seamlessly when we empower those closest to the individual components of the operation to make assessments, use their individual senses and make small local judgment calls when needed.

Don't get me confused, this is not to say that conferences and meetings are not necessary. What's important is that you go into them with plans to use the time to execute a few important predefined things that can only be taken care of when you stop and are gathered together. We leave satisfied and motivated when a few small but important objectives are completed and important unified decisions made without a lot of loose ends. We don't want to leave with more concerns to consider than when we arrived. How then do we do a better job with the prep to make these meetings swift and effective?

One of the most intense endurance sports is auto racing where drivers are hyper-focused on what's in front of them. It's quite unique because you have a car performing and a driver performing. The driver needs to be so in tune with themselves and the competition they develop tunnel vision. They can't worry about the car. It would be like running and checking if your shoes were tied every 2 minutes. They have to rely on pit stops at the speeds they are going. Still, through diagnostic tools and crew, they maintain constant communication with the vehicles needs by reporting back and taking in small manageable inputs so they can avoid a huge catastrophe and make the most out of the seconds they have in the pits. Some of the most experienced elite distance runners have lost leads in races because they make a wrong turn with only a few miles to go. Interestingly enough, some extremely long races require for pacers to assist in guiding the primary competitor by running side by side with them so that their mind can shut off a bit while they continue to drive there body. In both cases the inputs from the people that care about you and take interest in supporting you are critical sensory extensions. Much like in Kaizen you are building on communication to create an ecosystem that starts to work seamlessly as one. Departmental KPI's and siloed results become less indicative of outcomes for the business as a whole.

Now then, if these few insights have intrigued you why not try to take small steps towards this Kaizen approach of continuous improvement. Whether you are in a position to try it a the office or another area of life I think it's worth a shot. Just remember, with this method it's important to install some new reinforcement tools. Try to find subtle opportunities for publicity and recognition with peers and more frequent affirmations whether to your self or with others. Be sure to take a posture that invites unsolicited feedback and work to provide it in the form of curios questioning. Identify modest but personalized incentives in much less regimented intervals and focus them on growth and opportunity. Remember this is all about improving sensitivity and awareness so developing these incentives requires paying close attention to the needs of others vs. reverse-engineering them to the needs of shareholders or executives. A few ideas I've tried is to recognize my team in front of a client. Taking time while you're live on the air to say thank you vs. in a post opp review means a lot. I've sent numerous unsolicited letters of appreciation and recommendations to vendors, filled out more of those customer satisfaction survey I receive than I'd care to. No matter how small your company I've learned there are opportunities to sponsor local events and the contributions are very much needed and appreciated. Show up to support someone delivering a presentation to some key stakeholders or even give them a like on social media when they share something important to them that may not benefit or interest you. Start thanking people for no reason. All too often uneventfulness is a blessing and direct result of discreet proactivity from the least recognized sources. The greatest allies don't constantly remind you how much they support you. Ask questions with interest even when seemingly nothing is at risk and listen intently to your surroundings. Ultimately, these actions will start to invite reactions, new activity, and awareness that can manifest at a manageable pace. During this time you can develop the reflexes in you or your team required to be on the balls of your feet and prepared for situations that require a reaction. When everyone starts to get more out of each other they will give more back. Certainly, I have been inspired by my team to write this article to help me recall at least a few of those immeasurable steps have built our standards and become our brand identity. It's a great exercise to help me recognize the opportunities we create together could not be possible without all of there contributions in areas I can't attend.

The lesson comes full circle for me as I assess whether these fit only together as analogous references or if my sport is possible only because of our practice at work and vice versa. In retrospect, I believe without the flexibility, sense of support and adaptation of a Kaizen approach to business there's too little time and room for sport and recreation in many companies and career paths. It's nearly impossible to find balance or rhythm in static cycles of anticipatory stress, reporting, celebratory relief and repeat. Instead, a business that can find flow leaves room for individual pursuits with less need for over the top events or absolute retreat. Finding health, fulfillment and wellness at home requires just as much effort as ambitions at work. To be successful individuals need balance. If they have it then they can replenish the soils at the office and work with be much more fruitful. I believe this symbiotic and balanced relationship amongst work, home and play is the secret to finding endurance.