W. Edwards Deming’s ideas about leadership, systems, variation, and psychology continue to shape how organizations pursue quality and improvement. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections exploring Deming’s teachings—and how they apply to Lean, healthcare, management, and continuous improvement today. Many of these posts challenge common misinterpretations of Deming’s work, emphasizing that quality cannot be delegated and that improvement starts with leadership.
There’s no magic about the number five. I’ve seen some people write that five is somehow a “magic number.” No, that’s not really the case. Ask why more than once, probably more than twice…
The world (especially the world wide web) is full of surveys. Tell us how we’re doing! Your satisfaction is important to us! We see this so often, it’s easy to become numb to it in our Yelp-ified world. It’s definitely…
The W. Edwards Deming Institute posted a video of Kevin Cahill, a grandson of Dr. Deming, welcoming people to the event and talking about innovation, or the desire that people have for it. But, they don't know what to do...
There's a really good article that was published by Modern Healthcare as a special report, written by Sabriya Rice. Sabriya spent a week observing a rapid improvement event (RIE) at the Sts. Mary and Elizabeth Medical Center in Illinois. It's an in depth article that, I think, very accurately reflects the reality that Lean is helpful, but the process isn't easy for a number of reasons.
I used to like the slogan, “Lean and Green are two sides of the same coin.” I even used it as a tagline in presentations in which I was arguing that there is a potential for significant synergy between the Lean and sustainability programs in my company.
Today's post is an excerpt from the collaborative ebook project Practicing Lean. I wrote the first two chapters of the book and then asked others to contribute their early stories about mistakes and lessons learned.
In this 2015 conversation, John Dyer reflects on his career at General Electric — including attending Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s four-day seminar and a smaller follow-on course — and what happened when he took Deming’s 14 Points back to GE…
I stumbled across an article from the Inc. magazine archives from 1987, so it’s today’s “Throwback Thursday.” In 1987, I was starting high school and that was probably right about the time when my dad, an engineer for General Motors,…
As I mentioned on Monday, I’m working on a 3rd revised edition of my book Lean Hospitals. Traditional book publishing is a funny (and sometimes frustrating) value stream, in a lot of ways. There are many batches and many queues along…
I forget what hospital these charts are even from, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s become more common, in my gemba visits, to see hospital departments charting metrics. They are often part of “huddle boards” that teams gather around on…
tl;dr: Deming’s Red Bead Experiment shows that most performance variation in healthcare comes from the system–not individual effort. Incentives, threats, and goals don’t reduce defects; leadership must redesign the system and create psychological safety for improvement. Later next month, at…
tl;dr: A sushi company’s safety and quality policy illustrates what hospital operational excellence really requires: visible leadership commitment, daily practice, and systems that make safety the default–not a slogan. I love the Texas-based grocery store chain “Central Market.” It’s basically…
