A hospital VP I worked with once told her board the number of infections had dropped from 4 to 3. She got a small round of congratulations. The next quarter, it went to 5, and she had to explain what…
Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace…
My Starbucks mobile order has led to different pickup experiences at different stores: different labels, different places to look, and different rules for when a Nitro Cold Brew gets poured. These observations began in 2024. They illustrate a service-design problem…
I'll be teaching my "Better Metrics" workshop (aka "Measures of Success," ala my book) twice in June:
Cambridge Investments - Open for Public Registration (Fairfield, Iowa) -- June 5
Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit (Chicago) -- June 13
After facilitating the Red Bead Experiment in the workshop, one other way I've found to simulate variation is an online simulation that's available, of all places, on the BBC website:
"Can chance make you a killer?"
Are minor league games taking longer? Well, yes and no, depending on the league.
My next book, Measures of Success, is about the use of this Process Behavior Chart methodology in the workplace, as applied to our performance measures.
This post explores some data, how asking for more data can be more helpful, and how to use charts to evaluate a metric over time.
As I blogged about yesterday, things went well at the Oscars... or, at least, no errors were made in the announcements. But that thing that didn't go well was the TV ratings.
Two Data Points Are Not a Trend
The headlines I saw had a lot of two-data-point comparisons. Headlines sometimes gave the percentage decrease in viewers or how many million fewer viewers there were. Many talked about "record low" but if you're tracking a metric "record low" or "all-time high" doesn't mean there's a "special cause." That "record low" could still be noise in the system.
My favorite book, as I've written about before, is not a "Lean book" -- it's Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos by Donald J. Wheeler, PhD. It might look like a book about statistics...
As I’ve done before (and written about), I’ll be facilitating the famed “Deming Red Bead Experiment” on Thursday at the Society for Health Systems annual conference. See this pages with notes and slides. The intent of the exercise is to…
I was quoted in two articles that appeared in “Today’s Hospitalist”: Reducing Waste The author, David A. Frenz, MD, points out that it’s a “collective delusion” that the U.S. spending so much more on healthcare leads to safer or higher…
My wife and I just got back from four days in Napa and Sonoma counties doing, ahem, “gemba walks” at a number of wineries, both large and small. As tourists, we like doing winery visits where you get to walk…
