Mark Graban

For a long time, I've wanted to attend a "Statistical Process Control" (SPC) class taught by Donald J. Wheeler, Ph.D.  I'm finally doing this in September and I'd like to invite you to join me.

Joining me again for Episode #308 is Mike Grogan, a previous guest in episodes #182 (from Tanzania) and #224. Mike now lives in the Philippines, where he's helping and coaching many people and has written a new book, The MESSI Way.

I was very sad to see the news about Anthony Bourdain's death, reportedly by suicide. I regularly watched Bourdain's TV shows, "No Reservations" and "Parts Unknown." I don't normally get too excited about celebrity, but I do remember entering a contest where the prize was a chance to have dinner with him. I also read his famed book Kitchen Confidential, which I really enjoyed. The other day, I saw a friend post a link to his 1999 article ("Don't Eat Before Reading This") in the New Yorker, which led to the 2001 book. He had a way with words, on the page and on screen.  

Recently, I stumbled across some video of me and Dr. Greg Jacobson giving a talk at a health system. I think it's from 2013. So, I'm sharing this as a "Throwback Thursday." KaiNexus software has changed and evolved a lot in five years as the company has grown. Kaizen, or continuous improvement, principles and practices are timeless.

Today, I'm giving a talk at the International Society for Blood Transfusion (ISBT) conference in Toronto. I was invited by the company Quotient to participate in a panel presentation and discussion with some laboratory professionals from the U.S. and the U.K. The others are presenting examples of how they have improved flow, productivity, and quality in blood collection and hospital blood bank settings. Lean often gets portrayed as just being about efficiency or flow, when Toyota's definition of the Toyota Production System talks about how flow and quality go hand in hand. I was specifically asked to give a short talk titled, "What Do Cars Have to Do With Healthcare? How to Adopt and Adapt Lessons From Manufacturing."

Hello readers. I wanted to let you know that I plan on taking a bit of a hiatus from blogging the next few weeks. It's a priority to get my book Measures of Success done (or as "done" as an eBook ever gets) before the Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit in mid-June....

Back in 2014, I wrote an article for The Lean Post: "Standardization is a Countermeasure, Never the Goal" I'm a big fan of Taiichi Ohno's advice to "start from need." I cringe when I hear people say that we should standardize the way work is done "because Lean says so." There's no substitute for judgment in the grey areas related to standardized work. What should we standardize? For what purpose? How standardized should the work be? Baseball is struggling with questions like this... how standardized should the balls be... and for what purpose?

I'm still working on my book Measures of Success, as I've mentioned here a few times.  The partial "in-progress" book is available through LeanPub.com. Or, when it's done, it will also be available through the Amazon Kindle bookstore and I will probably also produce a paperback version. My goal is to have the book done by the Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit in mid-June (hope to see you there at the Summit and/or my workshop on these topics).  Here is a recorded webinar that I did for my friend Mike Stoecklein and his organization, the Institute for Excellence (IEX).

Today is one of those days where I think, "Forget what I have to say, read this...." This being a LinkedIn post written by James Hereford, the CEO of Fairview Health Services in Minnesota. "How huddles help us lead" I think the "us" says a lot, instead of a headline about "How huddles help ME lead."

For a long time, I've been an advocate for the parallels between Lean and an approach called "Just Culture." See previous blog posts on this topic. Here's a good overview of Just Culture, which says, in part: "A just culture recognizes that individual practitioners should not be held accountable for system failings over which they have no control. A just culture also recognizes that many individual or active errors represent predictable interactions between human operators and the system in which they work. However, in contrast to a culture that touts no blame as its governing principle, a just culture does not tolerate conscious disregard of clear risks to patients or gross misconduct, such as falsifying a record, performing professional duties while intoxicated, etc."

I'll be teaching my "Better Metrics" workshop (aka "Measures of Success," ala my book) twice in June: Cambridge Investments - Open for Public Registration (Fairfield, Iowa) -- June 5 Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit (Chicago) -- June 13 After facilitating the Red Bead Experiment in the workshop, one other way I've found to simulate variation is an online simulation that's available, of all places, on the BBC website: "Can chance make you a killer?"

I first learned about an approach to personal development called "The Harada Method" when Norman Bodek co-authored a book with Takashi Harada: The Harada Method: The Spirit of Self-Reliance. Norman was a guest on my podcast in 2013 to talk about this... The Harada Method has been on mind again recently thanks to the success of Major League Baseball player Shohei Ohtani, from Japan.