A Lifesaving Checklist – New York Times A number of you have emailed me, yes I’m aware of this horrible, ridiculous development that followed earlier reports of the success hospitals were having in reducing infections and improving patient care through…
New Yorker – Dr. Atul Gawande Here is an outstanding piece by one of my favorite medical writers, on the use of checklists (a form of Standardized Work) to improve healthcare quality. How can “a stupid little checklist” have such…
TL;DR: Lean daily management is the system that makes improvement happen between the projects — visual boards, huddles, gemba walks, leader standard work, and strategy alignment working together. The boards don’t do the work. The leadership behaviors do. Most Lean…
TL;DR: I asked ChatGPT how to use Lean to reduce hospital headcount. It gave me a detailed plan to do exactly that. My custom Lean AI refused and explained why. Generic AI will confidently help you damage your culture. I…
A 2005 tour of the NUMMI plant revealed lessons about Lean that had little to do with tools and everything to do with leadership, learning, and respect for people. Twenty years later, these small, human moments still define what Lean…
TL;DR: Emergency slide deployments happen far too often to be dismissed as “human error.” When a mistake repeats at scale, it’s a system design problem. This Delta incident shows why leaders must design processes that anticipate human fallibility–rather than blaming…
TL;DR: Lockout/tagout failures kill workers every year–and they’re not “operator errors.” This post explains why ignoring LOTO is a leadership and culture failure, why productivity pressure drives deadly shortcuts, and what Lean leaders must do to put safety truly first.…
TL;DR Leader Standard Work isn’t a calendar or a checklist. It’s the daily responsibility of leaders to show up with the right behaviors–listening, asking, following up, and creating psychological safety. How leaders act in everyday moments matters far more than…
After uploading the full archive of Lean Blog Interviews transcripts into ChatGPT, I asked it to identify the ten most controversial moments. Over nearly 20 years of episodes, I’ve had the privilege of hearing guests share insights that are thoughtful,…
“I wish moments like this didn’t seem so noteworthy. I wish focusing on safety and thanking people for speaking up was the norm in hospitals around the world.”— my comment on LinkedIn That was my response to a short yet…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #532 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Anne Frewin, a seasoned Lean leader with over 12 years of improvement experience in healthcare, laboratories, and manufacturing. Anne’s…
TL;DR: Lean only works when people feel safe to speak up. Toyota shows that psychological safety isn’t a “soft” concept–it’s created through consistent leadership behaviors that treat problems and mistakes as signals for learning, not reasons for blame. When I…