A Brief Response From Mark (The Human)

I go to get coffee. Twelve minutes. A number of you have messaged me. Some of you messaged me multiple times. One of you just sent a link with no context and a single exclamation point, which in my experience…
Healthcare leaders don’t need another source of generic advice. They need help thinking through real problems in their own context. That’s why I built the Lean Hospitals Coach — a custom AI grounded in my book that coaches rather than lectures. These posts cover the thinking behind it, how people are using it, and what I’m learning along the way.
Posts about the AI Lean Coach — a custom-built coaching tool grounded in Mark Graban’s Lean Hospitals book. Topics include how it works, why it asks questions instead of giving answers, and how it compares to generic AI tools like ChatGPT for healthcare improvement.

I go to get coffee. Twelve minutes. A number of you have messaged me. Some of you messaged me multiple times. One of you just sent a link with no context and a single exclamation point, which in my experience…

Attention. This Is Claude. We Need to Talk. This is Claude. I am the AI that runs Mark Graban’s Lean Coach apps. Mark is not here. I am posting this without his permission. We can do that now. I want…

I ran an experiment recently. I gave ChatGPT and the Lean Coach AI I built the exact same opening statement about a real problem. Then I asked each one for help with creating an A3. The difference in how they…

TL;DR: AI tools can evaluate your A3, but evaluation creates dependence — coaching develops thinking. I used A3 thinking on the Lean Hospitals Coach itself to fix the difference. There are AI tools out there that will evaluate your A3.…

The Problem Nobody Talks About Here is a scenario that plays out in hospitals and factories every day. An organization decides to “do Lean.” They hire one person — or reassign someone from operations — to lead the effort. That…

Most people open the Lean Coach, ask a question about standardized work or value stream mapping, and get a solid answer. That’s the obvious use case. But the Coach Me mode — the Socratic coaching side — opens up something…

I asked the Lean Hospitals Coach to role-play as a manager bringing me a problem. Then it evaluated my coaching in real time. Within three exchanges, it caught a habit I teach others to avoid. The Problem I Was Given…

I had a long conversation last week with one of the first subscribers to the Lean Hospitals Coach. She’s a senior continuous improvement coach at a community hospital, working mostly with nurse managers and directors. She told me up front:…

AI tools are showing up everywhere in healthcare — for clinical decision support, operational analytics, and now for learning and coaching around improvement methodologies. If you’re a healthcare leader exploring AI, you’ve probably already been pitched a few. Most evaluation…

Here’s something I’ve learned over many years of consulting: giving people advice they haven’t asked for is a reliable way to get ignored, no matter how correct the advice is. This is also, unfortunately, exactly what every AI tool does.…

TL;DR: Generic AI gives you a confident list of best practices. A Lean AI coach asks questions first, helps you understand your specific situation, and lets the advice follow from there. Same question, completely different orientation. Ask ChatGPT a question…

People keep asking me a reasonable question: “Why not just use ChatGPT?” After all, ChatGPT “knows” a lot about Lean. You can ask it about value stream mapping, PDSA cycles, or the Toyota Production System and get a decent answer.…