You Are Not Standing Still

If you’re in a safe space and physically able…I’d like you to try something.

Stand up, tilt your head back, and stand on your non-dominant foot (with your other foot off the ground).

Easy enough, right? Most people can do this without much thought.

Now close your eyes and keep standing on that one leg for 30 seconds.

How did you do? If you’re anything like me, you likely started to wobble. Some even need to put their other foot down to regain their balance.

Three systems, not one

It turns out our bodies keep us upright using three inputs working together. After doing some research (thank you, Google!), I learned all about this.

First up is vision. Our eyes hand our brains instant reference points. The horizon, the floor, the doorframe. From those, our brains constantly calculate tiny posture corrections.

But the eyes don’t work alone. They also need our ears. Specifically, they need our vestibular system. These are fluid-filled canals in your inner ear that sense gravity, motion, and the position of your head.

Finally, we have proprioception, which I’m glad to be writing about since I’m not 100% sure how to pronounce it! These are sensors in our muscles, joints, and the soles of our feet that report where your limbs are and how pressure is distributed across your foot.

Your brain uses all three and produces a single, seamless feeling of stability. When you close your eyes, you cut out the fastest and most dominant of the three. The other two have to carry the whole load, and they were never built to do it alone. So many people lose their balance.

That was the answer I went looking for. But it wasn’t the most interesting part.

The interesting part

Here’s what I missed the first time through.

When your eyes were open, you weren’t actually stable. You were making constant micro-corrections and experiencing the result as stillness.

Closing your eyes didn’t introduce instability. It slowed down your correction loop enough that you could finally feel the instability that was there the whole time.

Neurologists have a formal version of this. It’s called the Romberg test, and it’s been in use since the 1800s. Stand with your feet together, eyes open, then closed. If you’re steady with your eyes open but sway or fall once they close, the test is positive, and it points to a proprioceptive problem the patient had before they ever walked into the office.

Read that again. The deficit existed all along. Vision was covering for it. The only way to find it was to take vision away on purpose.

And there’s one more detail I love. In the strictest reading of the test, swaying isn’t the failure. Swaying is evidence that the correction system is still working. Falling is the failure.

What this has to do with your process

I’ve spent the majority of my professional career around organizations trying to improve, and I think there are three lessons sitting in this.

1. A stable process isn’t actually stable at all. It’s continuously corrected.

We talk about processes being “under control” as though control were a resting state. It isn’t. Entropy is always pulling. Every process you have is either being corrected constantly or it’s drifting and nobody has noticed yet. There’s no third option, and there’s no standing still.

This is the best argument I know for why daily improvement beats the annual improvement event. The annual event is a big, late correction, the equivalent of catching yourself after you’ve already started to fall. Daily kaizen is the micro-adjustment you don’t even register as an adjustment. Same energy, radically different outcome, and the difference is entirely in the frequency of the loop.

2. Your strongest input is hiding your weakest.

Vision is so fast and so dominant that it masks whatever proprioception can’t do. Organizations have these too. The veteran supervisor who can walk the floor and just know something is off. The buffer inventory sitting between two processes. The expediter who saves the shipment every month. The heroic firefighter everyone calls.

None of those are necessarily bad. But every one of them is covering for a deficit, and as long as it’s covering, you can’t actually see what’s underneath.

Lean thinkers have been making this exact move for decades. Lower the water to reveal the rocks. Reduce the inventory, run the line one person short, shorten the changeover window. You’re not creating the problem when you do this. You’re running a Romberg test on your process, and the wobble tells you where the opportunity is.

3. You can train the other systems, but only by using them.

The research on this is encouraging. The brain’s ability to shift its reliance from one input to another has a name: sensory reweighting. And the best news of all? It’s trainable. Gymnasts and judo athletes lose far less balance than untrained people when they close their eyes, because their training has forced them to depend on proprioception. I also learned, during my research, that long-term Tai Chi practitioners show the same flexibility.

Notice how it develops. Not by studying balance. By repeatedly operating without the crutch.

If your operation depends on one person’s judgment, one buffer, one hero, the answer isn’t to admire the dependency. It’s to develop the other systems until they can carry the load. Create standard work so the knowledge isn’t in one head. Develop problem-solving skills at every level so escalation isn’t the only path. And create a visual workplace so the floor tells you what’s wrong without a translator.

The question

The balance test takes less than a minute, and it tells you something you can’t learn by reading about it.

So here’s mine for you this week. What’s your organization’s vision system? What’s the fast, dominant input that makes everything feel steady?

And what would you find out about yourself if you closed it for a day?

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