This edition of Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape explores strategy, flow, and culture in environments where improvement is harder than it looks. From how organizations can “play to win” without direct competition, to learning through cardboard simulations in healthcare design,…
At first glance, it might look like a group of adults playing make-believe in a large garage. But what’s happening at the Swiss Center for Design and Health (SCDH) in Nidau is far more serious–and far more Lean–than that. In…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guests for Episode #430 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast are Eric Ethington and Matt Zayko, the authors of the new book The Power of Process: The Story of Innovative Lean Process…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients It’s been 20 years since To Err is Human, the seminal report from the Institute of Medicine, was released, estimating, to many people’s surprise, that almost 100,000 deaths per year in hospitals could be prevented. …
My guest for Episode #342 of the podcast is Adam Ward, the author of Lean Design in Healthcare: A Journey to Improve Quality and Process of Care. Adam is an innovation process expert and independent advisor. He spent the first…
Lean sometimes gets, I think, an unfair rap that it’s only a method for incremental improvement. See this article, for example: “Limits of Lean — Transformative Care Redesign Must Go Beyond Typical Lean-Based Improvements.”
In my travels, I often meet people or visit organizations that say something like: "We're doing Lean... we just call it Process Improvement." They have a "Process Improvement" (PI) department...
Joining me for Episode #271 is Isaac Mitchell (@IsaacMitchell), talking about Lean Design for healthcare, the Society for Health Systems, and more. Isaac is a full-time lean practitioner at East Tennessee Children’s Hospital, a lecturer at the University of Tennessee’s…
Recently, I wrote about an on-site event that I helped the Iowa Lean Consortium and Mary Greeley Medical Center (MGMC) organize… here is my first post about the morning of that event, if you missed it: Celebrating & Sharing Continuous Improvement…
Joining me for Episode #265 of the podcast is Bernita Beikmann, AIA, EDAC, LSSBB, a Principal and Director of Lean Strategy at HKS, an international architecture firm. Bernita is originally from Kansas and has a Bachelor of Architecture from Kansas State University…
I was fortunate to take a nearly two-week vacation recently, a trip that included a week in France. My wife and I had a chance to, I guess, do a number of “gemba visits” at some wineries in the Burgundy,…
Continuing to go through my notes, picking up from my last post… Visuals The presenter said something that’s certainly a familiar challenge with facilities here in the U.S.: ‘”Patients often get lost due to a lack of good signs.” One…
