This post is about improvement and its role in a crisis. But I’m choosing a subject matter that has nothing to do with essential services. I realize that everyone has something they really miss about the way the world worked before this crisis became such a battle. 

For me, I really miss sports. 

I grew up playing sports, and they are still a big part of my exercise routines to this day. I have a few teams that I have rooted for since I was young - LSU Tigers, New Orleans Saints, and the Atlanta Braves. 

Growing up, one of my clearest memories was watching the Saints play during Sunday lunch as a family, and even today, my entire family wears purple and gold everywhere we go. Heck, I still remember when the cable company trenched our backyard in the early 80s and TBS showed almost every Braves game.

More than anything though, I miss watching my children (and children everywhere) compete. My family has progressed through baseball, soccer, basketball, golf, and volleyball, and I can certainly attest that watching children compete is one of the purest forms of both anxiety and joy there is. Sports represent some of the best memories of my life, and I’m looking forward to a day when sports can be played freely and joyously again.

We continue to learn more about COVID-19 every day. To help our network know what sources to reference, we created a blog post that lists out all the resources we found valuable. Since publishing our COVID-19 resource post on March 18, we have added sources daily to our growing list. To make sure you don't miss out on any updates, we are highlighting the most recently added resources below. If you'd like to see the full list of resources, check out our original post.

My colleague Jeff Roussel kicked off (or I should say teed up) this series by writing about opportunities for improvement (OIs) when out playing golf. I loved it (when I read the draft), and I'm not a golfer -- but I do like bad puns. But, more of us are still going to the grocery store, so we thought it was important to publish this post first. Stay tunes for the golfing one!

I do love to eat. I even love to cook. And, I'm doing more of that while sheltering in place at home. Lettuce, I mean let us, look at some OIs that stores are (or should be) adopting and things that we can do to protect ourselves and our fellow shoppers.That's the last pun that I can think of, probably. So, please don't be chicken about continuing to read.

This week, I played game show host when we hosted a Quiz Show webinar about Covid-19. The answers and discussion were provided by our local expert (and KaiNexus CEO) Dr. Greg Jacobson.

One thing I do for KaiNexus is managing our webinar series. Each time we present a webinar, we have a standard set of survey questions that appears at the end for our attendees.

The survey is standardized, meaning we ask the same questions each time. Standardized work is a core concept of Lean and the Toyota Production System, but standardization is always done for a purpose. In this case, we always want to learn the same things about our webinar attendees, including what they liked about the webinar. We also want to know what could have been better -- we're obsessed with continuous improvement like our customers are!

Part of that obsession is that we do improve our standards over time -- we can call that "kaizen" too.

But back to the survey, one other question that we always ask is:

First off, we'd like to thank our panelists, Katie Webb Cyphert, Sara Evans, and Jeff Roussel, for joining our webinar. If you weren't able to attend, you can find the answers to some of your top questions about how to cope with kids in quarantine below.

We included many resources on different ways keep your kids engaged and entertained at the bottom of the post. Additionally, if you're specifically looking for resources on how your district can successfully implement school at home for kids, be sure to check out lead4ward's school@home. Lead4ward provides informative, concise, and creative tools to help support your district's transition to this new norm of school at home. 

Many conversations about our fight against the Coronavirus imply that combating the virus is unnecessarily destroying the economy. Or, said another way, to preserve the economy, we need to relax our fight against the virus.

Thank you to everyone that participated in our COVID-19 Quiz!

If you missed our COVID-19 quiz webinar, you can find a full recap of all the questions, answers, and an explanation from Dr. Gregory Jacobson, after the video.

Sign up for today's webinar to find out how much you know about COVID-19 and learn the answers to what you don't!

How long are we going to be physically distant?

I don't know the future but since so many people ask me, I would like to give you my thoughts on how this is going to play out eventually. If you haven't had a chance to read about the Hammer and the Dance yet, I recommend you go read this first. I really like that terminology and visualization, and it is a model that we are hopefully starting to follow in this country.

We are not going to be physically distant forever. At one point the cost-benefit ratio of distancing will no longer be in balance. There are costs of remaining 100% distance forever (for instance, the economy will go from a recession into a depression, and there will eventually be wide scale social/mental collapse).

On the other hand, there is a cost to remaining 100% social (lots of people dying unnecessarily because our healthcare system will collapse). We are going to end up somewhere in the middle. I personally think the Hammer will be in terms of weeks, and The Dance will be in terms of months - if we can get our act together.

Sabbath and Coronavirus - those are probably two words you would not put together...

Recently, I have researched (and not on the obvious), the Sabbath. Everywhere I looked and everything I saw said, "to slow down," "you are exhausted," "you aren't enjoying your life." The word Sabbath started appearing everywhere. People on Instagram, Podcasts, reading, everywhere.  

So what is Sabbath? Sabbath by definition is a day set aside for rest and worship. Sabbath was given to us by God as a gift and a commandment. As believers, we are told to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. It's the day you are to unplug and appreciate all you have - through a hobby, a walk, anything that helps you relax and recharge.  

We’ve been writing a lot about physical distancing lately, as this has proven to be the most effective way to slow the spread of COVID-19. Without limiting social contact, we don’t have a chance at slowing the spread of the infection - which means an overloaded healthcare system and a lot of unnecessary deaths.