Thanks as always to Ryan McCormack for this… there’s always so much good reading, listening, and viewing shared here by him! Get these directly from Ryan via email. Insights about improvement, innovation, and leadership… Operational Excellence, Improvement, and Innovation What’s…
Thanks as always to Ryan McCormack for this… Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Customer Experience practices are being more widely adopted in healthcare. Patient satisfaction surveys are no longer enough to put the patient experience at the centre of care.…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients It’s been more than 10 years since Atul Gawande wrote The Checklist Manifesto, showing the world that a simple 2-minute checklist prior to surgery resulted in fewer deaths. Adoption is “pretty spotty”, and in…
Last week, I received a few questions from somebody at a hospital system and I thought I'd address one of them here: "Can you suggest any "quick wins" to get staff engaged in a Lean culture?"
Are there parallels between medicine and organizations when we look at the tension between heroism and the sometimes boring work of preventing problems and improving things? I comment on an article by Dr. Atul Gawande…
TL;DR: Lean isn’t about “idiot-proofing” work–it’s about respecting people. True Lean focuses on improving systems (through mistake-proofing and better design), not blaming or deceiving workers. When leaders treat people as capable professionals and fix processes instead of people, quality, learning,…
Today’s post is a throwback to an essay that I originally wrote for the excellent book Lean-Led Hospital Design: Creating the Efficient Hospital of the Future, where it appears in an appendix with some other contributed essays. You can listen to…
I’ve been a big fan of Dr. Atul Gawande’s writing for a long time (see previous posts about him and his work). His latest article is out, which I was able to read last night. It just came out (or…
Is Lean management a “slow idea”? In this post, I reflect on why Lean and Kaizen often spread slowly in healthcare and organizations, drawing on insights from Atul Gawande’s essay on innovation. I just read Dr. Atul Gawande’s latest piece…
I always get annoyed when people spread the false dichotomy of “Lean is about efficiency and Six Sigma is for quality.” Replace the word “efficiency” with “speed” or “flow” and it’s still wrong. Here is an example of this falsehood…
Producer Clare Crawford-Mason shares behind-the-scenes stories of W. Edwards Deming and the 1980 NBC documentary If Japan Can Do It, Why Can’t We?–and reflects on Deming’s lasting impact on management, healthcare, and leadership. Listen: My guest for episode #167 is…
A number of readers have sent me a link to the latest New Yorker missive from Dr. Atul Gawande (whose work I greatly admire). It’s titled “Big Med: Restaurant chains have managed to combine quality control, cost control, and innovation.…
