Lean Blog Audio

I wrote a new piece for LinkedIn that I hope would be of interest to you even if you’re in healthcare. Why? It’s a story about what an organization does when you don’t have enough (or any) direct work for your front-line staff to do. Toyota would continue paying employees and would put them to...

I get asked a lot, "How do you know if a hospital is truly 'Lean?'"Nobody is ever perfect or "fully Lean," but you could ask, "How do you know if somebody is on a legitimate Lean transformation journey?" http://leanblog.org/audio120

Last year, Joe Swartz and I hosted a workshop at his organization, Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis. We called it“Kaizen Live!” and it was designed as an opportunity to see a culture of continuous improvement – what does it look like? What do people say?We lay this out in our Healthcare Kaizen books... http://leanblog.org/audio119

Alternate title:“Lean is an Integrated System. Of Course Just Implementing Pieces Leads to Failure.” Throughout the 10 years that I’ve been involved with Lean healthcare efforts, I’ve heard multiple stories of organizations that ended their formal Lean initiatives. They do so, as I’ve been told, because they need to cut costs... http://leanblog.org/audio118

At KaiNexus, we've been fortunate to have a good relationship with Professor Ethan Burris, from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business. He has done a lot of research and publishing around employee engagement and idea systems, as I've mentioned here on the blog before: "Is Fear the Only Reason Employees Don't Speak Up?"Burris has a new article on the Harvard Business Review website: "Employee Suggestion Schemes Don't Have to Be Exercises in Futility"

In the article posted today, Pamela Hartzband, M.D., and Jerome Groopman, M.D. (the later the author of the popular book How Doctors Think), rant about all sorts of things… some of which have nothing to do with Lean... http://leanblog.org/audio116

http://leanblog.org/audio115 A hat tip goes to Brian Buck for sharing this quote via email recently. Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was a pithy and wise man. I didn't remember this quote, but it is attributed to him. It's very appropriate for the type of work we do. I shared it last Saturday in my "Key Tweets" post, but it's worth discussing here in a separate post, I think.

I had a bit of a new year's resolution about being positive and not fretting about organizations that don't "get it" when it comes to Lean. But, resolutions are meant to be broken, I guess.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. Hospitals that say to their staff that Lean is just about cutting costs (or demonstrate that) willfail to engage their most important asset -- their employees. http://leanblog.org/audio114

http://leanblog.org/audio113 This article, from December, was floating around social media the other day (hat tip to Paul Levy):Don Berwick Offers Health Care 9 Steps to End Era of 'Complex Incentives' and 'Excessive Measurement' Among the points that Berwick makes, here is the one most directly related to Deming, Lean, and continuous improvement: 5. Recommit to improvement science: For improvement methods to work, you have to use them, and most of us are not. I'm trying to be polite, but I am stunned by the number of organizations I visit today in which no one has studied [W. Edwards] Deming's work, no one recognizes a process control chart, no one has mastered the power of testing PDSA (plan-do-study-act), Nathaniel's Method or the route to the top. You can see the proof of concept. This is beyond theory now.

How is it that we have two realities out there in healthcare... in parallel, Lean is awesome and Lean is horrible. It depends on where you are, unfortunately. I had an amazing day yesterday with a major health system...