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.
Hat tip to Mike S. for pointing out this HBR article “Why “I’m Sorry” Doesn’t Always Translate.” The piece talks about the differences in cultural norms about apologies in countries ranging from Japan, China, India, and the United States. I’m…
TL;DR: Long before Lean and Kaizen became common language in healthcare, Don Berwick argued in a 1989 New England Journal of Medicine article that improvement requires leaders to stop blaming “bad apples” and start fixing systems. His message–replace fear with…
One thing I have enjoyed in the past few years is meeting and working with more people with direct experience working at Toyota (including here in San Antonio, my new home). There are always gems and brilliant nuggets that come…
MD Anderson Cancer Center shares a lot of great material online and at conferences. here is an audio presentation (with slides) by Doris Quinn, PhD, Director, Process Improvement and Quality Education titled: W. Edwards Deming: The Man and the Message.…
Preventable medical mistakes remain one of the most serious challenges in healthcare, yet many hospitals still struggle with learning from medical errors and preventing them from happening again. From emergency departments to pathology labs, the same types of errors continue…
In this month’s ASQ blog post, their CEO Paul Borawski writes a new post “The Intersection of Quality and Social Responsibility,” where he defines Social Responsibility succinctly as “Doing well by doing good.” One reason I have always been attracted…
Many leaders in healthcare (including John Toussaint, Paul Levy, and others) are working to eliminate the “name, blame, and shame” culture that often exists in hospitals. This push (in my mind) started with W. Edwards Deming, who taught that 94%…
Saw this in the most recent Fast Company: Is Your Manager A Creativity Killer? If the manager is something like a case study from the book The No A**hole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t,…
I went through our new book Healthcare Kaizen to categorize the different improvement examples in the book… We have, by my count, 124 examples from hospitals and healthcare organizations around the world., not including the fun examples from Chapter 12…
ASQ and others have announced the passing of a quality legend, Dr. Genichi Taguchi, in Japan, at age 88. Dr. Taguchi is known for, among other methods, the Taguchi Loss Function and other statistical quality improvement methods. He was awarded the…
Here are some notes and key points from Day 1 of the Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit. There are over 500 people here from North America and around the world (including a group, again, of about 40 from different hospitals and…
After meeting him at a conference a few years back, I consider Patrick Anderson, executive director of Chugatchmiut, to be a good friend in the Lean world. He graciously endorsed Healthcare Kaizen, as he is working hard to create a…
