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.
Today, I'm sharing a link to some free "Lean 101" material that the AMA has created for physicians. I'm not sure when this initiative launched, but I just learned about it... the AMA is offering some online education about Lean in healthcare...
How many times do we hear people say things like “We don’t have time for Lean” or “We don’t have time for Kaizen“? It happens a lot, right? As I’ve said before (and this video) a “lack of time” is a problem to solve...
Watch the full documentary and find the related posts in this series. Recently, I shared the famed 1980 NBC documentary, “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” that essentially introduced W. Edwards Deming to a mainstream Western business audience. Today, I’m…
Through our practice of Lean, we’re looking at processes and our management system, looking to identify waste and opportunities for improvement. Lean is about engaging people to have them ask why we do things a certain way or if things…
Last week, as I had mentioned, was our first ever KaiNexus User Conference. We had a great time with our customers and it was amazing to see them share their progress and lessons with each other. I gave a keynote talk on “Getting Back to Basics with Lean.” We also had a professor, Ethan Burris...
In the past, I used the term “implement Lean” and it’s a hard habit to break. Back in about 2008, my client in the British NHS system really didn’t like the term “implement.” One of the internal process improvement leads made a good case that the word “implementation” implied an effort that had an end...
Today's guest is Katie Anderson, and we're talking about her experiences living in Tokyo for 18 months and what she's learning about Lean culture, Japanese culture, and how those aren't always one and the same...
Many of you don’t care about football, but you might find it interesting, as I did, to learn that Northwestern’s defensive coordinator Mike Hankwitz is apparently a fan of Kaizen...
The W. Edwards Deming Institute posted a video of Kevin Cahill, a grandson of Dr. Deming, welcoming people to the event and talking about innovation, or the desire that people have for it. But, they don't know what to do...
Today's guest is Eric Dickson,MD, MHCM, FACEP, the president and CEO of UMass Medical Center. Today's podcast is a recording of an interview that I did on stage at the 2015 Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, as part of the CEO panel I was moderating.
There's a really good article that was published by Modern Healthcare as a special report, written by Sabriya Rice. Sabriya spent a week observing a rapid improvement event (RIE) at the Sts. Mary and Elizabeth Medical Center in Illinois. It's an in depth article that, I think, very accurately reflects the reality that Lean is helpful, but the process isn't easy for a number of reasons.
In the KaiNexus webinar that I did with Dr. Greg Jacobson earlier this week (“Making Time for Continuous Improvement” – view the recording), I shared a graph that shows what could or should be time for continuous improvement in a workplace. The red…
