Category Blog

All Blog Posts

All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.

What Do Cars Have to Do With Healthcare?

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."

Major League Baseball Works on Standardizing the Ball… For What Purpose?

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?

My Book “Measures of Success” and a Free Webinar Recording

Measures of Success Roller Coaster

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).

Are Hospitals Not Getting Any Closer to Having “Just Cultures?”

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."

When Hospital Rankings Punish Luck Instead of Performance

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?"

Is a Drop in Kaizen Submissions a Real Signal or Just Noise?

Last week, I wrote Part 1 of this piece about TQM and "Small Kaizen" at a Japanese Hospital pharmacy.

The hospital was happy that employees were participating in their "Small Kaizen" process, but there was a month in which they saw the number of submitted Kaizens drop, from about 138 to 58 or so.

As I write about in Measures of Success, two data points usually don't make a trend.

Small Kaizen in a Japanese Hospital Pharmacy: Big Improvements Without Big Projects

I'm overdue in writing more about my last trip to Japan a few months back.

Today, I'll like to share some highlights from one organization we visited, Seki Chuo Hospital, which is located outside of Nagoya. I have visited this hospital in 2012 and 2014 and it's interesting to see how their approach to Total Quality Management (TQM), Lean, and Kaizen has progressed and evolved. I mentioned them in a 2014 post about "quality circles."

The Three Questions That Reveal Whether Your Organization Respects People

I'm often reminded of three challenging questions that are asked by Paul O'Neill, former CEO of Alcoa and former US Treasury Secretary. 

I've mentioned the questions before, in this blog post about Eric Ries and an employee's bill of rights. See more blog posts and my podcast with Mr. O'Neill.

Sadly, I'm reminded of the questions when I'm around people who cannot answer "yes" to them in healthcare workplaces. This is a widespread problem.

From Pets to Vets: Applying Lean in Unexpected Places [Podcast Preview & Webinar Recording]

I played host for a recent webinar that we're hosting on Monday, May 7, featuring a presentation by my friend Chip Ponsford, III, DVM (pictured at left), a veterinarian who has become quite a strong Lean advocate in recent years. 

We've taught Lean together at a Veterinary Medicine conference (as I blogged about here) and I've been collaborating with Chip on his LeanVets.com blog.

Trending now

Alt text: A yellow pull cord hangs untouched above an automotive assembly line while workers continue building vehicles in the background.
Thirty Years Later, “Keep the Line Running” Is Still the Message
Empty hospital wellness room with armchair, succulent, and noise machine — designed but unused
What 21,050 Clinicians Told Us About Fear and Futility
scanning medication at the bedside
The Independent Double Check and the Risk of Human Error
Hands in blue medical gloves preparing a syringe over a sterile plastic tray with needles and medical supplies
When “Human Error” Is the Root Cause, the Investigation Stopped Early