TL;DR: Deciding feels like progress, and learning is what makes a solution hold. This is a working hypothesis about why executive problem solving so often skips the second part, and where I suspect it falls apart. The meeting goes well.…
TL;DR: Two data points don’t make a trend — whether it’s gas prices, Oscars ratings, or your team’s monthly KPIs. Snapshot comparisons (“up from last week, down from last year”) give the illusion of insight without the reality of understanding.…
Every few years–or let’s be honest, quite often on social media–we see a statistic making the rounds: “70% of Lean initiatives fail.” It’s usually presented as an indictment of the methodology. And quite often, the person sharing it seems to…
tl;dr summary: Early adoption of Process Behavior Charts would have changed how organizations approached Lean–reducing noise-driven reactions, improving root cause analysis, and helping leaders focus on true signals. Lean would have had a clearer path, and many transformations might have…
Recently, I saw someone reference a chapter from Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s book Out of the Crisis on LinkedIn–Chapter 11, titled “Common Causes and Special Causes of Improvement. Stable System.” It was a good nudge for me to revisit a…
I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be presenting a 90-minute “intensive” session at the 2025 Health Systems Process Improvement (HSPI) conference, organized by the Society for Health Systems. This year’s event will take place in Atlanta, and if you’re passionate…
Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace…
TODAY marks the centennial of one of the most significant innovations in quality management: the control chart. “A ‘special cause’ for celebration.” Brian Buck, on LinkedIn LOL. Shewhart’s Breakthrough: Understanding Variation In the early 1920s, Walter A. Shewhart, working at…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #501 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Marcia Daszko, a speaker, workshop facilitator, and consultant. For more than 25 years, she has passionately been speaking, consulting,…
TL;DR: Five years after the print release of Measures of Success, the core lesson still holds: reacting less to data and understanding variation leads to better leadership decisions–yet many organizations still struggle to apply this thinking consistently. Today is the…
Thanks as always to Ryan McCormack for this… there’s always so much good reading, listening, and viewing shared here by him! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. Insights about improvement, innovation, and leadership… Operational Excellence, Improvement, and…
Thanks as always to Ryan McCormack for this… there’s always so much good reading, listening, and viewing shared here by him! Get these directly from Ryan via email. Insights about improvement, innovation, and leadership… Operational Excellence, Improvement, and Innovation Fit…
