Here is a great video by Masaaki Imai, author of the classic books Kaizen: The Key To Japan's Competitive Success
In the video, he emphasizes that kaizen means continuous improvement and he points out that a better definition would be everybody improving, everywhere, and every day.
This is the spirit that my co-author, Joe Swartz, and I are trying to capture in our book titled Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Improvements
In introductory material, we talk about the role of Kaizen Events, a popular approach in healthcare (often called Rapid Improvement Events or Rapid Process Improvement Workshops). These events aren't bad, but they're also not a complete approach to Lean or kaizen. We are writing the book because we think most healthcare organizations are missing out on the opportunity to, as Mr. Imai puts it, engage everybody in improvement every day, everywhere in the organization.
In the book, Joe and his organization, Franciscan Health System in Indiana, are sharing many of their experiences and lessons learned, primarily around Norman Bodek's “Quick and Easy Kaizen” methodology. We will be publishing many kaizen examples to illustrate the method and mindset.
I am bringing in examples from other organizations, including those who are using other variations on kaizen, such as the visual idea board. What's important isn't really the mechanics of things, but rather the mindset. How do supervisors and managers engage people in implementing small process and workspace improvements? How can senior leaders help promote and support these kaizen activities? What are common barriers to kaizen thinking and how can we get around them?
So we'd like to invite you to share your stories and examples with us. If you'd be willing to be interviewed for the book, please email Mark Graban. We'd hope that you could talk about your method for kaizen, what cultural changes you have made, and how you manage kaizen in a visual (or electronic) way. Hopefully you can share some photos and examples to help make ours a stronger book.
Key Tweets:
- A classic from 2007: Great Piece on Problem Solving http://t.co/gBTjO1g inspired by @MatthewEMay
- Sadly forced to game the system: MT “@lwalkerbtc: Man robs North Carolina bank of $1 to get free health care in prison http://t.co/J7VyOiM
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Really looking forward to reading what you come up with! Great for you to untangle a piece of “sustainment” by looking in to the kaizen techniques. Glad you are doing this, Mark!
[…] Kaizen means continuous improvement or “change for the better.” As Imai says, it’s about everybody improving everywhere, every day. […]
[…] this illustrates how kaizen doesn’t have to mean a week-long “kaizen event.” As Mr. Imai said, kaizen is everybody making improvements everywhere, every […]
[…] (because it includes also a moral component of ‘better for the world’). In a former blog of Mark’s, there is a video of Masaaki Imai in which he explains Kaizen as “everyone, everywhere, always improving’. He explains […]
[…] I’ve been talking to a lot of healthcare organizations about Kaizen and continuous improvement. There are many organizations embracing the methods that Joe Swartz and I wrote about in Healthcare Kaizen. I think there’s some momentum building out there for making sure that Lean isn’t only a bunch of projects — instead, having everybody engaged in improvement (as Imai says: everybody, everywhere, every day). […]