I’ve been reading The Birth of Lean, a collection of talks and interviews with the people who helped build the Toyota Production System. One passage stood out because it explains something I had never seen described this clearly: Toyota copied…
This edition of Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape explores how organizations build improvement capability through goals, learning, and culture–not gimmicks or shortcuts. From designing effective team goals and learning from the long history of suggestion systems, to insights on change…
I recently had an annual wellness exam through a hospital system’s primary care group. Everything went well and I had a good experience. Even though I can’t help thinking about opportunities for improvement, I wasn’t itching to provide any feedback.…
For decades, the suggestion box promised employee engagement and continuous improvement–but mostly delivered silence. In Lean organizations, Kaizen replaced the suggestion box with visible, collaborative systems that turn ideas into action. This throwback looks at why the suggestion box failed–and…
TL;DR: Digitizing a suggestion box doesn’t fix what’s broken. Real Kaizen requires fast feedback, local problem-solving, and systems designed for continuous improvement — not idea parking lots. Digital transformation is about rethinking and reinventing with digital tools. For over 13…
I’m looking forward to reading the new book by Uri Levine, the founder of Waze. It’s titled: Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs I hope to interview him on “My Favorite MIstake” because…
Thanks as always to Ryan McCormack for this… Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Customer Experience practices are being more widely adopted in healthcare. Patient satisfaction surveys are no longer enough to put the patient experience at the centre of care.…
As a senior advisor to KaiNexus and somebody who has been a member of the team since 2011, it’s been amazing to see how the company has grown and developed. What started as a relatively simple online Kaizen application, the…
Thanks to my friend Sylvain for sending me this cartoon. It would have been more timely for me to share this before Christmas, but there's an opportunity for improvement.
The cartoon series is called Real Life Adventures by Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich. This particular cartoon appeared on December 13, 2017.
Here's the top part... please click through to their website to see the entire cartoon and I'll talk about it here in this post, sharing links to other blog posts and videos on the topic.
Last week, I was in Austin for the annual Lean Coaching Summit, where I took a full-day class on “Motivational Interviewing” (as I had previewed here) and talking with a lot of great folks (familiar faces and new connections). A…
Back in 2014, I wrote about a CBC radio piece that featured, among other organizations, St. Mary’s General Hospital in Ontario: You can check out that post with a link to the CBC audio and my summary of it: Must…
I've written a lot about suggestion boxes, and usually in the context of how they don't work well. Many aspects of traditional suggestion box systems sound great, but don't work in practice. What doesn't work: Boxes not being opened very often, being reviewed by a committee or executives...
