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…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guests for Episode #550 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast are Elisabeth Hendrickson and Joel Tosi, co-authors of the new book Signals & Levers: Systems Thinking Tools to Unblock Software…
Someone in a meeting sees a problem coming. Maybe it’s a risk in the plan, an assumption that doesn’t hold up, or a direction that doesn’t feel right. They don’t say anything. The meeting moves on, and the moment passes.…
Accounting teams see problems every day. As Nick Katko puts it, they fix them, but they don’t necessarily solve them. We talk about what a continuous improvement system looks like inside an accounting department, the three parts of that system,…
I recently recorded an upcoming episode of the Lean Blog Interviews podcast with Dr. Peter Pronovost, the Chief Quality and Clinical Transformation Officer at University Hospitals (UH) in Cleveland. Most people know him because of the ICU checklist that cut…
In July 2013, on a test drive in the United States, Martin Winterkorn, the CEO of Volkswagen, noticed a paint imperfection on a Beetle. The paint was slightly thicker than the company standard. Less than a millimeter too thick, according…
Emily Swaney, VP of Operational Excellence at OhioHealth, explains how a Lean Promotion Office of 11 people supports a Lean management system for 35,000 associates. The approach relies on developing leaders as problem-solving coaches and on connecting daily huddles and…
There’s a nursing model where one nurse passes medications to every patient on the unit and does nothing else. Another nurse does treatments. An aide does baths and vital signs. Nobody is responsible for a patient. Everybody is responsible for…
When the door from the office area opened onto the production floor at Toyota’s plant in Durban, South Africa, I heard a familiar sound from other Toyota plants I’ve visited: the andon music. Earlier this month, before speaking at the…
I’m traveling internationally for ten days and I turned on one of the British news channels. There’s a major story about NHS England. First, the awful reality that a nurse would willfully kill babies in the NICU. Then, the second…
Season 2 of The Rehearsal opens in a cockpit. Two pilots are on final approach. The first officer thinks they’re lined up wrong and says so, mildly. The captain brushes it off. The first officer tries again, a little more…
In 2006, regulators cited a hospital in Madison, Wisconsin for six violations of state and federal rules after a patient died — three federal, three state. They threatened its license and its Medicare contract. The hospital updated its policies and…
