{"id":459,"date":"2021-05-04T04:25:34","date_gmt":"2021-05-04T04:25:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/?p=459"},"modified":"2026-01-30T06:50:21","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T06:50:21","slug":"brain-training","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/brain-training\/","title":{"rendered":"Brain Training"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

When I was pregnant, I turned down a couple of offers to speak at different international conferences because I didn\u2019t want to fly. Not that there is any evidence to say that I couldn\u2019t or shouldn\u2019t have flown of course, ever the catastrophist, I just didn\u2019t want to take what I considered to be unnecessary risks.\u00a0 Now of course, I could have most likely beamed in via zoom or such like, the pandemic proving that if you\u2019ve got something to say, you don\u2019t necessarily have to say it in person. \u00a0Still, it was hard to turn them down, because I loved my little trips away, the chance to feel important and that I was someone that people wanted to listen to – that what I had to say was valued.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

At the time, I didn\u2019t quite realise that there is a momentum to these types of opportunity as well. \u00a0One good appearance can lead to another, and another, so there is a casual easiness to their regularity when you are on top of your game and are known. What I hadn\u2019t quite anticipated was the impact that my maternity gap would have on such engagements.\u00a0 When I came back to work, the offers just didn\u2019t seem to be there and it felt, in lots of ways, that I had to start to build my profile again.\u00a0 Of course, I wasn\u2019t desperate to leave my baby so it made sense to focus on Cardiff for a while, but I sneakily hoped that one day, I\u2019d get an invite again.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Well it took 7 years, but finally I got one! To speak as part of a \u201cConnecting the Dots\u201d panel on day one of the (virtual) Katacon Europe Conference. I have to confess, I think I might have been a bit giddy from the seven years of waiting. In pandemic times, I am finding that I am even more talkative than I used to be… this is perhaps because before, I\u2019d ordinarily have benefitted from chatty relief thanks to incidental chat encounters experienced at a variety of intervals about the day and from nights out with friends. Working from home feels so isolating and when a chatty window does open, THOUGHTS rush out at great speed, bewildering recipients of those thoughts with their velocity and ferocity.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Maybe that\u2019s why I enjoy blogs so much. I can shape them and reread them before I press \u2018publish\u2019.\u00a0 So this blog will now attempt to say what I wanted to say at Katacon, calmly and eloquently.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

What I wanted to say<\/strong> was how much I love learning new things within the field of improvement. Kata, is one of the most important new movements and I\u2019ve written about my initial experiences of it here<\/a>.\u00a0 What I love about it is it provides a structured, repeatable approach to that critical part of being an improvement specialist, training your brain.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

My lean brain was trained thanks to two repetitive actions. The first was developing the 2 week Lean Fundamentals programmes with global lean experts from across the globe at Nestl\u00e9 and then repeating the teaching of this 2 week programme multiple times. There was one activity in particular which led to some of my major revelations of lean. At the end of each day, I\u2019d facilitate a session where we\u2019d all collectively go over what we had learned and discussed that day, and I\u2019d build connections between the concepts, to help people remember them.\u00a0 After each day we\u2019d repeat the action but we\u2019d have new concepts to add, so by the time we got to Day 10, the web of concepts and ideas was vast.\u00a0 In a strange way, the more that we learned (and I say we, because I learned lots every time I taught that programme) the more everything felt connected and the easier everything became … to the point where I had a solid network of what makes up improvement in my mind. (Of course, new ideas and concepts will emerge, like kata!)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The second way I trained my brain was by playing the Buckingham Housing Repairs game over and over and over again.\u00a0 It\u2019s a brilliant game, invented by the great John Bicheno, which illustrates how Systems Thinking can improve a chaotic, broken process, to an ordered, effective one, but facilitating it for the 56th<\/sup> time can grate on the nerves somewhat.\u00a0 \u00a0Mainly because you know the \u2018elegantly simple\u2019 solution in your head, and you have to be silent in the background whilst you watch team after team struggle to reach it.\u00a0 I have to confess, a certain amount of resentment is triggered because of the high feedback scores it is always able to secure as well (curse you Buckingham Housing Repairs Game my teaching evaluation score nemesis!) The game has trained my brain to search for simple solutions, when I categorically know that that was not the way that my brain was wired prior to playing the game for 56 times.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

So anyway, I believe the power of repetitive practice within improvement and how important it is, but I also know that there are so many movements and ideas that are important within improvement and that its impossible to get to a point where you know everything. We shouldn\u2019t ever want to get to that point because improvement is in itself, learning.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

That\u2019s what I wanted to say anyway\u2026 thankfully, the nights out with friends are back (woohoo!) so let\u2019s hope I\u2019m able to transmit my thoughts more coherently in future!<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I was pregnant, I turned down a couple of offers to speak at different international conferences because I didn\u2019t want to fly. Not that there is any evidence to […]","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":1033,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,5,6],"tags":[],"custom_author":[44],"class_list":["post-459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-innovation","category-lean","category-service-improvement","custom_author-sarah-lethbridge"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/554\/2021\/05\/Karate-kata.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/151"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1315,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions\/1315"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}