During a recent visit to Franciscan St. Francis Health, several nurses proudly introduced themselves as “Kaizen Queens”–and one, with a smile, as the “Kaizen Princess.” Across the hospital, the broader term “Kaizeneer” is used to describe anyone who takes part…
For those of you not familiar with Vine, it’s a social network owned by Twitter that allows you post videos that are six seconds long. The videos have sound and can loop repeatedly, which allows for some cool effects. I…
As I wrote about in Healthcare Kaizen, one of my favorite Lean transformation stories is the realization of an experienced medical technologist, John, that Lean leadership was about being “a coach, not a cop.” He had repeatedly said “no” to…
There have been plenty of headlines and updates since I first blogged about the controversy over Lean healthcare in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan (see my previous posts here). From my outside perspective, there are some good things happening. I…
Here is a 10-minute talk I gave at the 2014 Lean Transformation Summit, where I challenged the audience to think about barriers to continuous improvement differently. I’m introduced by Jim Womack and we do Q&A at the end. Every organization…
We all know the beaver is “the engineer of the animal kingdom.” That’s why MIT has a beaver as a mascot… It’s an engineer who likes to build things and is generally nocturnal, an apt description of MIT students. A…
“Weird Al” Yanokvic skewers corporate buzzwords in this new song and music video. He also skewers the now-tired (in my opinion) “hand writing on a white board” style of corporate videos, which I think is even more brilliant of him.…
I had a great conversation with my fellow Lean healthcare blogger, Brian Buck, the other day. We talk about once a month or so… Brian claims I am mentoring him, but it’s a great two-way exchange and discussion that I…
PDSA, back to the days of Dr. Deming, has stood for Plan Do Study Adjust. A key point in the application of PDSA (and a key to A3 problem solving), is to avoid jumping to solutions. We Plan — and this…
We’re halfway through the year. What reflections do you have on how the first half of the year is going for you, your team, and your organization? Is it time to “Adjust” as part of the PDSA cycle? Do you…
In November 2012, I had the opportunity to visit Japan for the first time as part of a Lean healthcare study mission. It was fascinating to compare notes with colleagues from the U.S., Belgium, and Holland as we visited factories,…
In the category of “not so new” (this blog is nine years old) and hopefully “somewhat improved,” you might notice a slightly different design today here at LeanBlog.org. The last major refresh I did to the site’s look and feel…
