All Posts on Lean Blog

Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients Compelling people with evidence or demanding compliance does very little to drive adoption of new practices - handing out articles, making posters and Powerpoint presentations to…
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Mark and Jamie Jamie Flinchbaugh and I got a great response to the first episode of our new "Lean Whiskey" podcast. We've had a great time with this and I'm happy that anybody is willing to listen :-) We've done our second episode,…
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My guest for Episode #342 of the podcast is Adam Ward, the author of Lean Design in Healthcare: A Journey to Improve Quality and Process of Care. Adam is an innovation process expert and independent advisor. He spent the first 12…
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Our last KaiNexus webinar took a deep dive into problem solving -- you can check out the recording on the KaiNexus website or through YouTube. The next webinar, being held on June 5, will take a step back to look at things from a…
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Over the past year, I've heard about the "OKRs" methodology that is used in tech companies like Google. OKRs stands for Objectives & Key Results. The approach (along with examples and case studies) are laid out in the book by…
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I always enjoy the KaiNexus User Conference (now called KaiNexicon starting this year) and they ask me to give a talk each year. Last year, I gave a talk called "When Being Right is the Wrong Strategy for Change" and KaiNexus recently…
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If you missed yesterday's blog post and podcast with Dr. Rob Hackett from Australia, please check it out. After meeting Rob and corresponding over the past few weeks about various patient safety issues, one topic that keeps coming up is…
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My guest for Episode #341 of the podcast is Dr. Rob Hackett, an anaesthesiologist in Sydney, Australia. Rob has become known around the world for his role in what's now called the "Theatre Cap Challenge" -- a method for improving…
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Be honest, would you have seen the intentional typo in the post title if I hadn't put it on quotation marks? It's still not easy to see, is it? Proofreading is difficult and it's impossible for even the skilled, dedicated proofreading…
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A few of you sent me this article from Modern Healthcare (thanks!): Virginia Mason Health CEO Dr. Gary Kaplan wages a war on waste As you can see in the screen shot of the start of the article, Dr. Kaplan says,…
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I've dropped the Kindle price of my book Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More to $2.99 as a way to spur sales and to get the book in front of more people. I shared a bit about this on LinkedIn (and, yeah, Amazon's…
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Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients A group of Winnipeg physicians is opening a clinic designed to treat non-emergent patients in an effort to reduce Emergency Room overcrowding. Tom Brodbeck of the…
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I haven't read it, but Marie Kondo's book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing has been a pop-culture phenomenon the past few years. amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "markgraban";…
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I've met Jarvis Gray a few times at the Healthcare Systems Process Improvement conference (I still call it the "Society for Health Systems Conference"). SHS is a great organization to be a part of, by the way. Jarvis recently launched a…
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Please join us on May 16, as KaiNexus and I host a webinar presented by a leader from one of our customers -- Chad Westbrook from AGCO Corporation. Chad is a manufacturing engineering manager and AGCO Production System manager there. …
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I got onto the elevator in the lobby of our condo building one day last week. Our building's maintenance guy was already on there with a rolling cart of tools and supplies. I asked him to let me hop on with him and said, "Good morning." …
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Normally, my only beef with "Lean Six Sigma" books is when they state the falsehood of "Lean is for speed, and you need Six Sigma for quality." But, recently I've noticed that Amazon "bestsellers" in the same categories as my books seem…
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Lean focuses on making it easy for people to do the right thing. We also work hard to "error proof" processes and our work to make it difficult, if not impossible to do the wrong thing. The Throwback Thursday portion of this post looks…
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