What Your Red/Green Metrics Look Like to a Color Blind Leader (and a Dog)
About 1 in 12 men has red-green color blindness. What that means for red green metrics, and why Process Behavior Charts don't depend on color.
Mark Graban
Mark Graban helps leaders build workplaces where people speak up and improvement sticks, through Lean management, psychological safety, and better use of metrics. He is a keynote speaker, advisor, and host of the Lean Blog Interviews and My Favorite Mistake podcasts.
He is the author of The Mistakes That Make Us, Measures of Success, Lean Hospitals, and Healthcare Kaizen, and a three-time recipient of the Shingo Publication Award. His next book is The Silence Tax.
Mark is also a Senior Advisor to KaiNexus. Get his free ebooks.
When Fast Fixes Crowd Out Root Cause Problem Solving
The results came fast. A year in, the defect rate was down, the turnaround time was down, teams had A3s on the wall and could talk about them. Then it flattened. Not a collapse. Just nothing more. Somebody says the…
Patient Safety Leadership Means More Than Telling People to Speak Up
A chapter published recently by Georgia Kyriakeli, a nurse leader at Papageorgiou General Hospital in Greece, makes an argument I wish more hospital executives would hear: leadership itself is a patient safety intervention. Not a background function that influences safety.…
What Stood Out in Toyota’s Kentucky Turnaround
In 1999, during his first year at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky (TMMK), Darril Wilburn was given two jackets and a watch. The gifts celebrated how good everyone felt about the plant. The Camry was the best-selling passenger car in the…
Why Would Smart People Allow a Culture of Silence to Persist?
When an organization gets described as having a culture of silence, the usual picture is of employees who won’t speak up. They saw the problem. They kept quiet. Afterward, somebody asks why nobody said anything. Sometimes that’s what happened. But…
What 1,008 Paddles of Red Bead Game Data Taught Me About KPI Reviews
A unit’s patient falls go from four to seven. In the monthly operating review, someone is asked what happened. Someone else promises to look into it. The next month, falls drop to three, and the unit manager gets a nod…
How Toyota Turned Around Its Kentucky Plant: Darril Wilburn on Leadership
Former Toyota team member Darril Wilburn, co-author with Hiro Yoshiki of Courage, Humility, Kaizen: The Three Disciplines of Toyota Leadership, tells the inside story of how Toyota’s Georgetown, Kentucky plant went from needing to build almost 90% of its capacity…
Toyota’s AI Welding Robot: Jidoka Meets Deming’s Funnel Experiment
Toyota’s history of building quality into the process goes back more than a century, long before the company started making cars. Now, a new AI welding robot developed by Toyota’s GAZOO Racing division and Yaskawa Electric offers an interesting evolution…
Carlie Irsay-Gordon Goes to the Gemba (Well, the Sideline)
Most NFL owners watch games from a luxury suite. Carlie Irsay-Gordon, the principal owner and CEO of the Indianapolis Colts, watches from the sideline near the bench, with a headset on and a notebook in her hand. She’s been doing…
Building an AI Email Filter With ChatGPT: A Kaizen Experiment
Another email arrives about a potential podcast guest. I haven’t responded to the first pitch, but the sender wants to make sure it didn’t get lost in my inbox. A few days later, there’s another reminder. I don’t necessarily object…
The Danaher Business System Page Talks About Speed. Where Did Safety and Quality Go?
Danaher has been one of the most cited Lean success stories in the United States for decades. The story usually starts at Jacobs Manufacturing (Jake Brake) in Connecticut in 1987, with Art Byrne, George Koenigsaecker, and the Shingijutsu consultants who…
When “I Have a Pulse” Gets Dismissed: A Toddler Found Alive in a Hospital Morgue
On Super Bowl Sunday in February, an 18-month-old boy was pulled from his family’s pool in Gilbert, Arizona, and rushed to Mercy Gilbert Medical Center. He was pronounced dead at 6:20 p.m. At 11:52 p.m., staff from the medical examiner’s…
