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I am currently co-authoring a new book with Joe Swartz (from the Franciscan Health System in Indiana) on a subset of Lean methods, focused on daily continuous improvement for front-line staff and supervisors, primarily. Much of the “lean healthcare” world has been focused on week-long events, as people have often lost sight of true “kaizen” – the daily, small, incremental improvement of processes and systems by front-line staff.
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I am a bit biased of course but Kaizen has always been the word for me.
Having taught and coached Kaizen for 20 years, it is only be teaching people to recognise MUDA, MURI & MURA and then minimise it one step at a time can you ever hope to suceed!
Richard – I understand your bias :-)
In the survey responses, I received today, I got the following pushback on the word “kaizen:”
– A lot of people are intimidated by the Japanese words in Lean
– “Kaizen” has become associated, especially in healthcare, with week-long events (a bastardization of the term, I’d say)
– Kaizen maybe hasn’t been done well, so people are burned out on the term.
Now this is a sampling from people who are experienced with Lean, not necessarily reflective of the general healthcare population who maybe hasn’t heard of Lean or Kaizen. Nor was everybody opposed to the word Kaizen… but opinion was definitely split and polarized, not a bell curve of acceptance.
Still mentally processing the feedback and thinking about this…
Good to know, especially for those who are against the word kaizen, coaching is derived from kaizen!
How about:
Better Every Day
Everyday language + subtle allusion to Gawande’s book