Quality doesn’t come from inspection, pressure, or choosing between speed and accuracy. It comes from well-designed systems, capable processes, and leaders who focus on learning instead of blame. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections on quality through a Lean and Deming lens—covering psychological safety, metrics, variation, leadership behavior, healthcare quality, and why sustainable improvement depends on fixing systems rather than managing people harder.
Mark’s Note: Today’s post is a another guest post from Chad Walters. Chad and I share a strong interest in sports — me as a fan and Chad as somebody who is working to bring Lean thinking to sports franchises,…
Last week, I blogged about the 1989 New England Journal of Medicine article by Dr. Donald M. Berwick, “Continuous Improvement as an Ideal in Health Care.” Dr. Berwick wrote that kaizen (as continuous improvement) is not alien to healthcare, as…
To end the week, here’s a piece by our friend John Toussaint, MD, CEO of the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value, that was published on CNBC.com: “Don’t Kill Me! What I Want From the Healthcare System: Author of ‘Potent Medicine“…
Hat tip to my dad who saw this commercial on TV back home in Detroit. It’s an ad from the Henry Ford Health System, trumpeting their improvements in reducing errors and infections. They say if hospitals around the world adopted…
Thanks to Healthcare Finance News for interviewing me for this piece they ran this week: “7 ways lean healthcare management reduces cost.” As I think the piece conveys, cost reduction comes as a result mainly from methods that are different…
Preventable medical mistakes remain one of the most serious challenges in healthcare, yet many hospitals still struggle with learning from medical errors and preventing them from happening again. From emergency departments to pathology labs, the same types of errors continue…
In this month’s ASQ blog post, their CEO Paul Borawski writes a new post “The Intersection of Quality and Social Responsibility,” where he defines Social Responsibility succinctly as “Doing well by doing good.” One reason I have always been attracted…
Thanks to the guys at Quality Digest… I was on their weekly video show “Quality Digest Live” last week, talking about “Healthcare Kaizen.” You can view the archived video here (click on the July 6 episode if that doesn’t play…
I went through our new book Healthcare Kaizen to categorize the different improvement examples in the book… We have, by my count, 124 examples from hospitals and healthcare organizations around the world., not including the fun examples from Chapter 12…
Did anybody else see this show hosted to Elizabeth Cohen on CNN last weekend, titled “25 Shocking Medical Mistakes“? You can see a video preview or read the transcript online. I’m not sure if the whole show is available online…
Ontario’s Peterborough Regional Medical Centre is about 18 months into their Lean transformation. They are being featured in a series of four articles in their local newspaper, the first two of which are already out. Article one: LEAN machine at…
ASQ and others have announced the passing of a quality legend, Dr. Genichi Taguchi, in Japan, at age 88. Dr. Taguchi is known for, among other methods, the Taguchi Loss Function and other statistical quality improvement methods. He was awarded the…
