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.
What happens when a mistake is made in your organization? How do you react when an error occurs? A lab specimen gets mislabeled. The wrong product is shipped to the wrong customer. A patient is injected with the wrong medication.…
We all know the beaver is “the engineer of the animal kingdom.” That’s why MIT has a beaver as a mascot… It’s an engineer who likes to build things and is generally nocturnal, an apt description of MIT students. A…
PDSA, back to the days of Dr. Deming, has stood for Plan Do Study Adjust. A key point in the application of PDSA (and a key to A3 problem solving), is to avoid jumping to solutions. We Plan — and this…
Mark’s Note: Today’s post is by Andy Wagner, who contributed regularly to this blog from 2007 to 2010. This CNN video caught his eye and he couldn’t help blogging about it. Recently, CNN ran a short piece on Worksman Cycles…
In November 2012, I had the opportunity to visit Japan for the first time as part of a Lean healthcare study mission. It was fascinating to compare notes with colleagues from the U.S., Belgium, and Holland as we visited factories,…
Today is the first day of the 5th annual Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit. Follow along on Twitter with hashtag #HCSummit14 to see my tweets and thoughts from others. I will be adding updates to this post during the day, as well. These are not…
=Following up on posts from Monday and Wednesday, we see this headline today: “Shinseki resigns after VA scandal.” As I wrote about on LinkedIn, instead of blaming “bad managers” or a “lack of integrity” at local VA sites, like Phoenix,…
Listen Episode #198 is a discussion with Harry Kenworthy about his work bringing Lean into local and state governments. We had a great conversation that touches on the influence of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and many other concepts that might…
I’m not sure why “error” was put in quotes since this seems like an actual error, not a quote-unquote error: Staff ‘error’ blamed for chlorine leak at Louth’s Kenwick Park Hotel which led to five being taken to hospital When…
Since moving to San Antonio two years ago, I’ve become a big fan of the San Antonio Spurs. For one, it’s essentially a civic responsibility to cheer for them, with the Spurs being the only major pro team in town.…
I’ve really enjoyed reading the book The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality, which was published last year. I think this link will work… You can view my public Kindle notes and profile online. If you haven’t read Dr. Deming’s…
Thanks to Dodge Communications for interviewing me for their blog: “Improving healthcare–there’s no instant pudding.” I was, of course, citing the late great Dr. W. Edwards Deming and his “There is no instant pudding” admonition. Hospitals and health systems are…
