My Pursuit of Living a Lean Life
In February 2020, I attended a master class in Helsinki by Dr. Gregory H. Watson, honorary member of ESTIEM and provider of the ESTIEM Lean Six Sigma Green Belt course. This master class was organized as part of the Continual Improvement Specialist Development Program (CISDP), a 5-week program aiming to equip its participants with concepts and advanced problem-solving tools to better tackle improvement projects.
This master class undoubtedly opened my mind to the role and importance of Quality in the strategy of companies, but what most resonated with me were the comments Dr. Watson made by giving a new perspective on how those same concepts can be applied in our own personal lives.
At some point, Dr. Watson commented that we should think as individuals if the actions and activities we are performing everyday make our lives “Lean” by delivering Quality and some kind of value to the world. In a broad sense, Lean Management can be explained as optimizing the use of resources in a way that delivers value to the customer and thus profits to a company. Minimizing waste is then an essential part of Lean Management. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense that the same thinking can be applied to me, as a person. Although the customers I am serving are not buying any products or services from me, my customers can be defined as all the people and entities I am interacting with. The organizations I am working for may be seen as customers expecting value from the work I deliver, my family and friends are customers expecting value from the relationships we share and my own self is a customer expecting, hopefully, a life of quality. It is as foolish for a person to waste precious time and money on what does not bring some kind value to his life as it is for companies to waste resources on tasks that do not lead to profits. The difference is that whereas companies fall and are created everyday, each life is unique and its time is more precious than any other resource you can think of.
As the rest of the master class was unfolding, I started viewing everything Dr. Watson was explaining from another perspective by trying to understand how I can apply these same concepts to my own life.
One of the models developed by Dr. Watson is the decomposition of a company into three levels: the Gemba 1, Gemba 2 and Gemba 3. The Gemba 1 being composed of the front-line workers performing the tasks directly aimed at the customer. The Gemba 2 comprises all the professions assuring the supervision and the integration of resources in the Gemba 1. Lastly, the Gemba 3 is where the senior executives are responsible for defining the strategy of the organization and serving the stakeholders.
As Dr. Watson was explaining the model, I started to think how this model can be applied to Yassine Loqmane Inc. Those three levels would then be explained — if everything was working perfectly — as follows. The Gemba 3 would be the time I spend making decisions, thinking about where I am heading in the future and how I can learn from the past, the Gemba 2 would be the time I spend planning my weeks and days and providing the resources I will need and the Gemba 1 is all the time I actually spend achieving those tasks.
In this same model, Dr. Watson explains that each different Gemba has a different objective, a different focus of improvement and is affected by a different type of waste (Figure 2).
I directly saw how these explanations are again applicable to myself. This made me feel a little bit uncomfortable as I could now clearly see that there was a lot of waste at all of the three levels. My Gemba 3 was often not aware of the importance of the decisions it was making, my Gemba 2 was obviously not harmonizing things enough and my Gemba 1 needed some discipline.
One common aspect between all customers is that they all expect quality from the products and services they are offered. Dr. Watson defines Quality — in his transcendental definition — as “the relentless pursuit of goodness coupled tightly with the persistent avoidance of badness”. One thing implied by this definition is that Quality is not something that is obtained randomly or only by wishing for it to happen. An organized and disciplined approach is needed in order to obtain consistent Quality. At that time, I had just finished my Green Belt project and I was still in the mood of measuring processes and thinking about improvements that could be implemented. The idea of starting a Green Belt-like project in my own life started growing in my mind.
I often envisioned myself in the future as a successful consultant advising companies on Business Excellence. That is a sound goal, but how can I dream about advising companies on improving their operations if I am not even able to do it for my own habits? Isn’t the improvement of my life more important to me than the improvement of some random company? The decision was made. I would start a three-month project in my own life and pursue a disciplined approach to improve my well-being.
“A project provides a forum for converting an atmosphere of defensiveness or blame into one of constructive action.”
Joseph M. Juran
Well-being is hard to define but I was able to break it down into different factors (see the mind map in Figure 3). Not all of them needed change at that time but three specific factors were calling for improvements: Deep Work, Fitness and Sleep.
I was spending a lot of time working but I did not feel that I had enough hours of Deep Work as defined by Cal Newport in his book — of the same name — where he explains it as a “professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit”. The second factor that needed improvement was fitness. I was practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (no, it is not capoeira) many times a week but I was struggling to make progress as I needed to improve my strength, flexibility and endurance. I needed to figure out a way to improve those three elements simultaneously and impress my Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu opponents. Most importantly, the element that I needed to drastically improve was my sleep. The number of hours I had each night was variating in an uncontrolled way and I did not feel that I consistently had quality sleep.
In this article, I will only explain how I was able to improve my sleep. What I can say about the other factors is that by the end of this project, I was able to have enough hours of Deep Work when I needed to and that the fitness level I reached allowed me to again start making progress in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (although I am not sure if my opponents were really impressed to be honest).
The reason my hours of sleep were variating so much was unclear to me at that time. If asked, I would probably give an excuse and say that it is only temporary. That it is due to an exceptional event (like an exam or a busy week) and that my sleep will somehow be back to normal after that, but it did not. I had no way to visualize how much my hours of sleep were variating, the reasons causing these variations and thus how to improve it. I had a vague idea about what was causing this bad quality of sleep but no way to prove it — Dr. Watson would say that my knowledge about my sleep was profane.
In his work, Dr. Watson explains that there are two different kinds of understating that the executives generally rely on to make decisions: Profound Knowledge or Profane Knowledge. Profound Knowledge being — as Dr. Watson explains it — the statistical understanding of real-world process behavior so that the future states of a system may be predictable with some probability. It focuses on variation and involves decisions that are based on objective reflection. Profane Knowledge is, on the other hand, the surface and naïve understanding based on the common sense that generally implies reactive decisions. To make my understanding about the process of my sleep based on Profound Knowledge — and thus be able to efficiently improve it — I decided that I would, for a three-month period, record every morning data about my sleep (Figure 4). The time I went to bed, the time I got out of bed, the number of hours of sleep I had (this measure being approximated) and the reason I did not have enough hours of sleep (if that was the case). This was not easy to do every day but the Gemba 1 had to do its work.
During this three-month period, I decided that I would follow a typical improvement approach used to put processes under a controlled state. In the first month, I recorded data without making changes to what I was already doing to visualize how much my sleep was variating and the different reasons causing it. In the second month, I tried to stabilize my sleep by implementing improvements as solutions to the problems I recorded in the first month. The third month was spent implementing small improvements to keep the trend going in the positive way and my sleep in an even more stabilized state.
For privacy reasons, I decided not to show the data I recorded about my sleep during this experiment (yes, we care about confidentiality at Yassine Loqmane Inc.) but Figure 5 shows how a measure is supposed to evolve in a well-conducted improvement project (if the variable of this measure is to be increased). Although the graph I got does not show in an obvious way the different steps (as in Figure 5), it follows the same trend (with some outliers). By the end of this project, I am happy to say that I was able to stabilize the hours of sleep I had every night and significantly improve the quality of my sleep, hurray!
Among the improvements I implemented were simple habits like not drinking coffee after noon or avoiding using screens at least one hour before going to bed. What made the most difference though, was a checklist of actions I religiously followed as a routine one hour before going to bed, to get in a relaxed state favorable to sleep.
I made the effort to follow this checklist at the same hour every day as an operator would follow instructions of a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) of a process in Gemba 1. I have also implemented simple mistake-proofing systems that prevented everything that could disturb this routine (an example being smartphone applications that stopped notifications and phone calls after a certain hour or prevented access to the internet). The improvement of my sleep paid dividend as it had a very positive impact in other areas of my life. I was in better shape during the day, I was able to better focus on my work and simply be more engaged in what I was doing.
Today, I no longer record my data manually as I used to. I bought a smartwatch that automatically records the hours of sleep I had each night, my physical activity and even my heart rate (I had to make the move to Industry 4.0). Although my sleep was considerably improved by the end of this experiment, the major outcome of this experience is a philosophy I have started to acquire of continually and methodically trying to improve important elements of my life.
When I talk to people about this experiment, some tell me that they cannot imagine themselves doing such a thing, that they prefer to live spontaneously and be free of all the burdens of accountability. Although I agree that one should live to some extent with spontaneity, I do believe that a philosophy of discipline, accountability and continual improvement is what eventually sets us free. Such philosophy allows us to mindfully choose our own habits rather than becoming the results of habits randomly dictated by our environments. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated in The Social Contract, “the mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty”.
At the end of the master class, Dr. Watson commented that when consulting organizations, the first question he would ask the executives is knowing if their company is “fossilized”. The executives would generally be puzzled by this question trying to understand what he meant. What he meant by “fossilized” is to know whether the company has flexibility that would allow it to withstand change and progress or if its situation is fixed in time as a fossil would be. Dr. Watson then advised us to think about our own lives and make sure never to become “fossilized”.
I personally think that in order to keep growing and progressing, one should continually try to control and improve key elements of one’s life so he can ultimately experience a life of Quality and offer as much value to the world as he possibly can.
“Control, control, you must learn control.”
Yoda
