Tag: Quality

Quality: Leadership, Systems Thinking, and Continuous Improvement

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.

Frontier Fails & Frontier Lies… Why Competence is Required Before Lean

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I think I'm done complaining about Frontier Communications on Twitter. It's been a very frustrating week, as I'm on day 6 of a complete...

From a Patient Safety Tragedy to Lean & Baldrige Success in...

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As Patient Safety Awareness Week continues, thanks to all of you who shared this PBS News Hour story with me via email or Twitter....

Podcast #245 – Dr. Tom Evans, Improving Healthcare Quality in Iowa

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Today is the first of two episodes that I'll post here during Patient Safety Awareness Week. I agree with the National Patient Safety Foundation...

Doctors Get Upset With Being Pushed, Bad Leadership, Clumsy Incentives; Try...

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A few weeks back, a number of you sent me this article from the New York Times: "Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine" The article...

How Hospitals Got the Wrong Idea That Lean Is Only About...

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It's very frustrating when I hear people in healthcare complain that their hospital or health system has equated Lean with cost savings -- only focusing on cost reduction or primarily focusing on it...

Kevin Cahill on His Grandfather W. Edwards Deming, Lessons, and Legacy

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Episode #238 is a conversation with somebody I’ve wanted to talk with for a long time, Kevin Cahill. He is the executive director of the W. Edwards Deming Institute. He’s also a grandson of Dr. Deming! ...

Simple Mixups & How Blaming Workers Doesn’t Explain or Prevent Them

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When we see a simple error, even in something as silly as sports memorabilia, we would ask "why?" or "how?" instead of "who?" Blaming individuals doesn't help...

The NBC Report That Changed Quality Management: Deming in ‘If Japan...

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The W. Edwards Deming Institute and Dr. Deming's grandson Kevin Cahill worked with NBC to make the 1980 program available, giving the institute perpetual rights to it (see their blog post). To the institute's credit, they've made this freely available on YouTube.

The First Ever Instance of “Lean or TPS Doesn’t Apply to...

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Lean is, of course, not about a better way to build cars. It's a transferrable philosophy, management system, and methodology that is being applied in many different settings and industries, including healthcare. I'm often told (sometimes by somebody who is being sort of huffy): "Patients are not cars." [...]

It’s Not Lean to Have Dysfunctional Efficiency Targets

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Lean healthcare really is a global movement. Last year, when I went to Japan, we had people in the group from all across Asia,...

Why Do We Need to Ask Patients to be Vigilant?

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Here's a "Throwback Thursday" post from this date back in 2008. The post is titled, "Why Do Hospitals Have to Rely on Vigilant Patients and Families?" I think it's still an important and relevant post, here in 2015. Why do we ask patients and families to be vigilant and inspect the work being done...

Captain Jack’s Cannonball Polish – Buy One, Get Two Free!

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Mark's note: Today's post is by Paul Critchley and he raises important questions that I've seen in both factories and hospitals. Here's his post... As I've moved through my career and Lean journey, I've been blessed to have met and worked with some really fantastic people...
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