Kaizen is often misunderstood as small ideas or isolated improvement events. In practice, Kaizen is a daily, people-centered approach to learning and improving work—supported by leadership, good systems, and psychological safety. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and real-world examples of Kaizen in action, across healthcare and other industries, with a consistent focus on leadership behaviors, respect for people, and learning from problems rather than hiding them.
I've blogged about football before - I should say "American football," since I have many international readers.
I should say I've blogged about events on the football field and the approaches of football coaches that remind me of Lean thinking.
Here are a few of those thoughts from last weekend -- topics include "lack of urgency," "that's not my job," and "the process."
Today’s blog post is about airplane food. It’s not about the quality of airplane food… it’s not an SNL Seinfeld-ish “what’s the deal with airplane food?” rant, if you remember that classic sketch. As I’ve sometimes blogged about, I fly…
I really enjoyed and appreciated this new white paper that was written by Dr. Lisa Yerian and Nate Hurle from The Cleveland Clinic: “No More Projects: Kick-starting a continuous-improvement culture in healthcare“ The paper was published by Catalysis and is available…
I am always happy to see something even vaguely related to the practice of Kaizen in mainstream publications. Here’s a recent essay from the New York Times: The Best Path to Long-Term Change Is Slow, Simple and Boring The author,…
Today, we’re looking back at a podcast that I did back in 2015 with Alan G. Robinson, PhD, co-author of many books including The Idea-Driven Organization. I’m talking about Kaizen today at the Studer Group annual “What’s Right in Healthcare” conference, so…
Back in 2012, I blogged twice about aspects of Dr. Donald M. Berwick's 1989 article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Continuous Improvement as an Ideal in Health Care.” The full text is only available to subscribers.
As I posted on LinkedIn, another aspect of this article caught my eye when I was reviewing it the other day in advance of my talk at the Studer Group "What's Right in Healthcare" conference next week.
One thing I like about Facebook is the way it reminds you about things that happened on this date in previous years. Facebook is reminding me these days about different milestones related to the publication of the book Healthcare Kaizen that…
Every month or two, Greg Jacobson, MD and I have an “Ask Us Anything” video discussion with questions submitted by members of our KaiNexus community. You can register for our next episode, number 14, which we’ll hold on August 15th.…
I've produced A LOT of content about Kaizen and continuous improvement over the past 11 years, including podcasts and webinars. Somebody asked me to build a "curriculum" and a sequence of podcasts and webinars for people to watch as a way of getting educated about this approach. So this post is an attempt at that...
It's been just over six years since I joined the team at KaiNexus, serving in various capacities over that time. As I like to say, even though I don't work full time with the company, I have a full commitment to the company, the team, and their approach.
The company has grown by leaps and bounds, adding customers not just in healthcare, but in other industries. You can read more about our aggregate customer results here. Recently, our customers just crossed the threshold of a combined one million hours of labor time saved, in addition to over $250 million in financial impact... in addition to quality, safety, customer and employee satisfaction improvements.
Back in 2011, I interviewed the CEO and co-founder of KaiNexus, Dr. Greg Jacobson:
Kaizen is an incremental approach to problem solving and continuous improvement. We don't need to put pressure on ourselves to make things perfect... we can focus on "a little better, every day."
In this post, I write about a phrase that I heard many times when visiting Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis. How can this phrase help us challenge ourselves and to find positive solutions instead of barriers and obstacles?