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.
In an article (“Assembly required: Health care from the Toyota factory floor“) from Canada’s National Post newspaper says Lean healthcare is “taking Canadian healthcare by storm.” The piece leads with some work done by Windsor’s Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital – a…
Recently, I was able to visit VIBCO, a Lean manufacturing company in Rhode Island. Company President Karl Wadensten is the host of “The Lean Nation” radio show. It was my third time visiting the factory in the last six months,…
What really motivates people to improve their work–especially in healthcare and other complex environments? Drawing on Daniel Pink’s Drive, Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s teachings, and Lean principles, this post explores why intrinsic motivation consistently outperforms incentives, rewards, and punishment in…
Unlike Thursday’s joke, this is real. It’s a video posted by the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME), featuring a full-time Lean professional, a “kaizen facilitator,” who is in the third year of coaching a youth (teenagers) hockey team in Ontario.…
Note: I edited the post title on April 3 to make it clear this was an April Fool’s Joke. Comments posted by readers on 4/1 and 4/2 may have been “fooled” – thanks for taking the joke in good spirits.…
I had the opportunity to finally meet “e-Patient Dave” at the HIMSS conference about 10 days ago, where he spoke on the topic of patient involvement and the patient’s right to their own medical data. As he describes on his…
Earlier this morning, I attended a presentation at SHS/ASQ about Lean implementation in multiple emergency rooms in a large health system. There were a lot of positives and one red flag that I heard that might be worth discussion.
A site related to my favorite failblog.org is “There I Fixed It,” a creative collection of bad workarounds or clever fixes, depending on your perspective. This one, below, is a creative solution that a police officer came up with for…
I try to keep things light here on Saturdays… one of my favorite sites is failblog.org and their related blogs. Although they normally document problems and bad designs and mishaps that would constitute a “FAIL,” they often have something that…
Today’s post is an email written by Patrick M. Anderson, Executive Director of Chugachmiut, Inc., the Tribal consortium created to promote self-determination to the seven Native communities of the Chugach Region in Alaska. You might recall my two podcasts with…
A phrase I keep hearing more of in the Lean world, even at a few hospitals is that leaders want “everyone to be a problem solver?” Is this uniquely Lean? Depends on what you mean by “problem solving.”
Language that undermines Lean, respect for people, and real improvement TL;DR: The words Lean leaders use matter–some common phrases quietly reinforce command-and-control thinking, fear, and misunderstanding rather than learning and improvement. If Lean is truly about respect for people and…
