The Real Lessons of Dr. Deming’s Red Bead Factory

I've written a lot about Dr. Deming's famous “Red Bead Experiment.” As a follow up to my workshop at February's Society for Health Systems Conference (we played the simulation with a group there), Mike and I promised to do a follow up webinar. Mike was supposed to co-facilitate the Red Bead session with me, but ended up having a schedule conflict.

But I'm glad we were able to finally do this webinar together. Our friends at the Healthcare Value Network (an initiative of the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value) hosted the webinar and many of the attendees were Network members, but they agreed to open this up to our personal networks as well.

View the slides

Mike had the good fortune to work directly with Dr. Deming (as we discussed in this podcast). He has great perspectives to share on all of this, of course. He's going to talk specifically about “managing variation” when you don't have numbers or data… what can you do?

Here is the recording (or via YouTube):

The Real Lessons of Dr. Deming's Red Bead Factory from ThedaCare Center for Healthcare on Vimeo.

Please see this white paper that Mike wrote on the topic:

Understanding and Misunderstanding Variation in Healthcare: Case Study

More lessons from the Red Bead experience as shared by our friend John Hunter on the Deming Institute blog:

Lessons From the Red Bead Experiment with Dr. Deming

And it includes this video: