People often talk about “fire fighting” in a colloquial way. Today, my guest for episode #278 of the podcast is an actual professional fire fighter, Tom Bouthillet, who serves as Fire Captain / Paramedic for the Hilton Head Island Fire Rescue...
This recent tweet of mine struck a nerve, apparently, based on the number of times it was liked and retweeted -- "Heard often: "We don't have time for improvement." Heard never: "We don't have time for fire fighting."
Here’s my latest cartoon collaboration with a skilled artist (and medical assistant), Carrie Schurman. You can see the whole series via this link. In the Lean world, we talk a lot about how “firefighting” is bad in an organization. What do…
“process arsonist” – Google Search I was talking with someone a few weeks back about the analogy of “fire fighting” in a workplace (something that applies in factories and hospitals… any workplace, basically). Typically problem solving involves just fixing the…
Below is some of the text from edition #3 of the newsletter from my upcoming book Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction. ————————————— Hospitals are notorious for employing “workarounds” to respond to problems. For example, when supplies…
