Checklists and Error Prevention on the TV Show ER
Hulu – ER: Old Times – Watch the full episode now. Thanks to Bryan to bringing this episode of ER to my attention. I don’t normally watch it, but my wife always DVRs it, so I was able to watch…
Tag Standardized Work
Standardized Work: The Foundation for Learning and Improvement
Standardized work is often misunderstood as rigidity or control. In Lean thinking, it’s the opposite: a shared baseline that makes problems visible, supports learning, and enables continuous improvement. This archive explores standardized work as a living system—one that evolves through observation, experimentation, and respect for people.
Examples range from healthcare and service work to manufacturing and everyday systems, showing how clear standards reduce frustration, improve quality, and make meaningful improvement possible.
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This Pilot Didn’t Follow Standardized Work?
Plane that crashed near Buffalo was on autopilot After “Sully” and his crew were lauded as heroes for following checklists, keeping calm, and landing that plane in the Hudson River, it’s sad and interesting that the pilot of the commuter…
What Do You Use To Set Staffing Levels? How About Data?
Hospitals need I.E. Data to Drive Staffing Decisions My hand is feeling a bit carpel-tunnel-ish today (that’s not a diagnosis). So I’ll take the opportunity to use something I already wrote for the Society for Health Systems newsletter (published recently).…
Relying on Memory Leads to Rework
Biden Takes Shot at Roberts for Flubbing Presidential Oath – First 100 Days of Presidency – Politics FOXNews.com On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to flub his giving of the presidential oath of office, leaving out the word “faithfully”…
Future Speaking Gigs
I’m fortunate to have a few private speaking gigs in the coming months (a hospital in Iowa, an online presentation for an engineering student group at Utah State University, and an MBA operations class at Wharton). I do have a…
Is this “Like Lean?” TSA Explains the "Explaining Why" Program
TSA: Why? The Reasons Behind TSA Security As much as I complain about the TSA, they do some things well. You might remember my blog post from 2006 about a sign put up by the Transportation Security Administration what explained…
Lost in Space
My Way News – Lost tool bag forces changes to planned spacewalks This makes wonder if the space program uses any concepts that we’d call “Lean” even if they don’t. This story makes me think of Error Proofing, Standardized Work,…
Emergency Docs Flaunt Standardized Work
Moonlighting county docs raise questions :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: The Watchdogs OK, this isn’t strictly a Lean issue, but this caught my eye in the paper near where I’m working. Regarding county doctors who work in the E.R. (think the…
A Lean Guy Reads FORTUNE
As I was reading the latest issue of FORTUNE (October 13), I had a few Lean thoughts based on a few articles (which I can’t find online at the moment). In the “The Best Advice I Ever Got” feature, it’s…
Driving in the UK
I’m proud to report that I survived driving in the U.K. for the first time today, driving about an hour to Cambridge. I’m working in a town without a direct rail link (would have to go down to London and…
Checklists at a Hotel Front Desk
There’s so much in the news about “checklists” in the medical context… and I’m convinced that it’s basically the Lean “standardized work” approach in a different name. Checklists help prevent people from making mistakes of omission — forgetting a step…
Checklists and How You Manage Them
Thinking back to a letter-to-the-editor that I mentioned last week, this is such a critical point, I wanted to think and write about it again, especially since it was in the comments and not everyone sees that. It’s not the…
