There is a very healthy amount of research regarding the performance of endurance athletes, and Lean thinkers especially ought to take a close look at this work for ideas that can be productively applied toward improving enterprise performance.
High performing endurance athletes train continuously. They do so not only to improve, but because not training leads to declining performance. A characteristic of leaders that fail to fully understand Lean thinking is their attitude that Lean is a set of practices to install, and once installed they are done. That is like an athlete deciding that since they finished a marathon this year they will be able to run a marathon twelve months later just as fast without any additional training.
Endurance athletes specifically train to improve their constraints. Cycling coach Joel Friel calls these constraints limiters, as they are the element of the athlete’s conditioning that will limit their performance. Friel distinguishes between limiters and weaknesses, as there is no point in improving weaknesses if they are of little consequence to a high priority race. Lean thinkers need to understand their value chains so they are focused on removing constraints and not simply improving upon weaknesses that do not matter.
Friel and other coaches help their athletes condition three primary systems essential to excellence in athletic performance. These systems are the muscular system, the central nervous system, and the cardiovascular system. Annual and race specific plans are kept general in nature so that adjustments can easily be made as athlete and coach undertake a regular Plan-Do-Study-Adjust cycle, even if not so named.
The muscular system converts fuel into power, and analogous to enterprise production systems. It’s informative to consider how muscles are improved by being tested, literally torn apart, and then rebuild themselves to better sustain the stresses undergone while being tested. That’s not unlike what Lean thinkers do to improve enterprise production systems. Note also that athletes do not rely on improving individual muscles, resources, but focus on improving the muscles in ways specific to how they will be tested in races so that the flow of energy into power is continuous and balanced with the demands of the race.
The central nervous energy system is responsible for integrating the operations of the muscles and supporting organs. A healthy central nervous system promotes quick responses to changing conditions, which for a cyclist traveling in a peloton at thirty miles per hour is important to avoid colliding with others while adjusting for turn, wind currents and other cyclist’s movements. This is a model for how communication is organized in an enterprise. Just as reflexive action without consultation with the brain is important to the athlete’s ability to make quick adjustments, enterprises need the capability to learn and adjust without consultation with leadership. Training is necessary for both athlete and enterprise for this capability to happen effectively.
The cardiovascular system fuels the body of an athlete, with the bloodstream carrying both oxygen and nutrients to muscles and organs. Every cell must receive enough oxygen to release the energy needed to keep the cell functioning, and when cellular oxygen demand exceeds the cardiovascular system ability to supply oxygen performance diminishes. In an enterprise money representing the value created by enterprise performance may be a suitable proxy for oxygen in this analogy. Determining how money is distributed among enterprise stakeholders and investment in the enterprise itself is vital to enterprise performance. It’s also the least understood aspect of Lean thinking and so requires some more deliberate experiments to learn about financial structures that are effective. In the building industry Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) agreements offer one promising direction.
