People often ask how I learned what I know about Lean. They are usually confused and disappointed when I tell them I learned a great deal of it from racing sailboats.

To the uninitiated, sailing is often seen as either idyllically romantic or as conferring great prestige on a person. These non-sailors don’t see the extreme physical and psychological demands, the analytical thinking, or the ability to gather, integrate, and act on information about a host of complex systems, that are a part of performing well at the highest level of competition — the Olympics, the America’s Cup, and the world championships for a handful of the most demanding classes.

Lean is less physically and psychologically demanding than racing small boats, but it requires many of the same skills to do it well — the persistence, the ability to find and fix small problems that others ignore, the ability to integrate many complex components into a whole with as little wasted effort, material, and time as possible, the ability to react quickly to a changing environment, having an overriding purpose (in sailing it is to win regattas; in Lean it is to please customers) and, above all, to improve, improve, improve — and improve again — every essential process and to eliminate those activities and ways of thinking that don’t add value.

Above is a beautifully produced story of Australian Olympic hopeful Oli Tweddell. It captures in part the quest of a sailor to master the processes of racing the Finn dinghy (“dinghy” is a general name for a small boat), designed and named for it’s first appearance in the Olympics 64 years ago at Helsinki, Finland. If you read between the lines of this video you can see the effort Oli puts into process improvement —  the process of tacking, the process of gybing, the process of spotting and steering around big waves, the process of surfing the boat down successive waves, the process of getting and staying in top physical condition.

Sailboat racing is full of Lean lessons beyond just process improvement. I can still remember how I learned one of my first great Lean lessons, that small things, even seemingly insignificant details, can matter a lot.

I bought my first boat, a beat up old International 470, when I was in high school, before I even had a car. I found that the spinnaker halyard (the rope used to pull up the big, often colorful sail at the front of the boat) kept catching on things at really inconvenient times. I decided to run the tail of the halyard down the inside of the mast to keep it out of the way.

The problem was that the mast was full of little styrofoam beads, originally required by class rules to keep the mast from sinking when you dump the boat. The mast sank anyway and the beads trapped water in the mast, making the boat harder to right, so they changed the rules to eliminate the beads. There were still many masts with those styrofoam beads, and everybody told me it was impossible to get them out, that I shouldn’t bother about it.

Instead, I contemplated the problem for a bit. Everybody else had tried poking or scraping these beads out with a stick. I tried a different approach.

I took the mast out of the boat, laid it on the launching ramp with the butt downhill, resting in a burlap sack. I removed the butt, stuffed a garden hose up the mast, and turned on the water. After a bit of poking with the hose the styrofoam beads washed right out. In five minutes they were all trapped in the burlap sack. Done.

Removing the beads had gone so quickly I put the mast back together, put it back in the boat, and went sailing. To my surprise, the boat was noticeably faster and more responsive over waves.

I had heard that keeping the weight out of the ends of a boat would make it faster (technically, concentrating the weight at the center of the boat reduces the polar mass moment of inertia, but you didn’t hear that from me). I’d had no idea that removing a couple of pounds of styrofoam beads from the mast could have such a noticeable effect.

That’s an important Lean lesson: We need to pay attention to even small details. Seemingly small things can make a significant difference. I’ve seen this many times in process improvement efforts. That’s a lesson that any Lean practitioner should learn and appreciate.

Sailing newer 470s than mine it was evident they were much stiffer, which made them faster. That only makes sense; the energy from the sails should go to powering the boat around the course, not into bending the hull.

These newer boats had bulkheads that did increase the stiffness of the boat, but were not optimally located. They didn’t offer the stiffness they could have. Having seen the problem, I laid up my own bulkheads and fiberglassed them into the boat in the right place. Again there was a noticeable improvement in performance.

I persisted in making mostly small changes to this old boat, making it easier to sail, making it stiffer, reducing the weight, and concentrating the weight toward the center of the boat. I got a regular crew, and spent a lot of practicing. Eventually I found that I won the occasional race. Winning, you see, is the result of continuous improvement. That’s very Lean.

Later a friend of mine bought an International 505 and asked me to crew for him. Having sailed it for a year with some success, we decided to fix some dings, move some equipment around, and paint it. That’s when numbers and measurements came into play.

When we stripped all the equipment off the boat, we discovered it weighed 45 pounds. All this equipment had been on a boat that was 28 pounds over the 281-pound minimum weight for the 505 class. In other words, the boat was ten percent overweight. Not good.

We carefully rethought what equipment we absolutely needed on the boat, and how to sail with less. When we put the boat back together we had 30 pounds of parts left over, leaving the boat two pounds under minimum weight.

Consider what this means: With a crew weight of 380 pounds, the all-up weight, ready to sail, was around 660 pounds. By losing 28 pounds of unnecessary equipment, we increased the power-to-weight ratio by over four percent.

The way drag works this might translate into a speed increase of over 1%, although the actual gain was probably less. Still, if we could achieve a 1% increase in a short, six-mile race, that would leave an otherwise equal competitor a football field length behind. That’s a huge improvement.

Another way to think about this is to recognize that for every boat length that boat sailed, it had to push an extra 28 pounds of water out of the way. In that six-mile race, the overweight boat had to push an extra 57,000 pounds of water out of the way, this using windpower alone.

The following year we raced almost every weekend, traveling tens of thousands of miles to regattas around the western USA and Canada. We did quite a bit better. Racing in our home state we finish the year with two third-place finishes, and one second-place finish. All of our other home-state races, we won. Our number crunching seems to have paid off.

One of the things that make racing small boats so challenging is that it’s nearly impossible to measure performance improvements in an absolute sense on small sailboats. Certainly it can’t be done with electronic instruments. So when it’s possible to use objective measures that influence performance, it’s critical to do so, with the understanding that there are many other variables affecting performance than the weight of the boat. Often we must simply do what makes sense and count on close attention to details to gain every possible advantage.

Lean is the same way, although it’s usually easier to get measurements with which to work. But the same caveat applies — numbers aren’t the whole answer. They should be treated with a mix of reverence for what they can tell us, and skepticism that they are representative of what is actually possible.

Something else sailing taught me: How to fail.

I’ve finished down in the pack far more often than I have won races. I’ve thrown away great leads by going to the wrong side of the course. When I was young and foolish I had things break that I should have checked and fixed. I’ve dumped boats so many times I couldn’t begin to count them; It is certainly well into the hundreds, perhaps in the thousands. But you right the boat, get back in, wipe the salt and sunscreen out of your eyes (or in winter, try to control the shivering, make your hands work, and catch your breath from swimming in freezing water), cough the water out of your lungs, and get back in the race.

Trying to do the improvement kata, you will run into much the same thing, though you usually stay dry and avoid the coughing, the burning eyes, or the freezing hands. You will try things that don’t work. You will go down blind alleys. You will have bosses who are violently angry at the intimation that there is room for improvement. But you get yourself back up, dust yourself off, and keep going. And, if necessary, go find a new job where the business stays focused on meeting the needs of the customer.

So what have I learned about Lean from racing sailboats?

Pay careful attention to details. Seemingly small things matter.

Measurements can be hard to get, but measure whatever you can, and take advantage of what those measurements can tell you.

You will never have enough information, so get enough experience that you can use inductive reasoning to settle on the best course of action in most situations.

Figure out not just what you need, but what you can do without.

Persist as long as it makes sense, and perhaps a little beyond. “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

Don’t fear failure. Master it.

Finally, the most obvious one: making many small things better over time constitutes continuous improvement. Continuous improvement can make you a winner, whether on the water, at work or — most important of these — in your family.

And that is, in part, what racing sailboats taught me about Toyota’s success.

 

Copyright 2016 by Paul G. Spring. All rights reserved.