Tag: Kaizen

It's been just over six years since I joined the team at KaiNexus, serving in various capacities over that time. As I like to say, even though I don't work full time with the company, I have a full commitment to the company, the team, and their approach. The company has grown by leaps and bounds, adding customers not just in healthcare, but in other industries. You can read more about our aggregate customer results here. Recently, our customers just crossed the threshold of a combined one million hours of labor time saved, in addition to over $250 million in financial impact... in addition to quality, safety, customer and employee satisfaction improvements. Back in 2011, I interviewed the CEO and co-founder of KaiNexus, Dr. Greg Jacobson:

Kaizen is an incremental approach to problem solving and continuous improvement. We don't need to put pressure on ourselves to make things perfect... we can focus on "a little better, every day."

In this post, I write about a phrase that I heard many times when visiting Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis. How can this phrase help us challenge ourselves and to find positive solutions instead of barriers and obstacles?

At the recent Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, there were thought provoking presentations... and we had many discussions about the role of incremental improvement vs. redesign or transformation. And, lots of discussions about imitating vs. innovating... so I explore those themes in this post.

In this post, I share some thoughts and build upon one of the presentations at last week's Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, where, Tim Pehrson, a regional CEO for Intermountain Healthcare, talked about how they piloted a continuous improvement process in one region... and how they're now spreading it throughout the system. This leads to confusion, in online discussion, about terms like projects, suggestions, ideas, and such...

There are many helpful videos on YouTube with great illustrations of Kaizen and continuous improvement mindsets and principles. In this post, I'm going to share three...

If we're going to practice Kaizen (continuous improvement), do the words matter? Should we call it a Kaizen Card or something else? Do we start with a "problem" or something else? Are we writing down "ideas" or "countermeasures?" Does it matter?

What if "easier" is less safe? Great question. It begs the question of why Safer isn't first in Shingo's list? Is it because safety is assumed to be such a fundamental pre-condition in the Toyota culture or the Lean approach? Safety is such a non-negotiable point that it doesn't need to be said?

A culture of continuous improvement is really powerful - in a pizza restaurant or any type of workplace. It engages Milennials and people from other generations too...

Here are three audience questions we didn't have time to address after a recent talk that I gave... questions about engaging people in improvement and about how to share and spread improvement ideas broadly.

Today's reader question comes from somebody who has been put in the position of what I call "the lone wolf" in a health system. This happens a lot. A health system hires or designates one person to be "the Lean change agent." It doesn't matter how amazing and/or experienced this individual is... I'd very skeptical about the organization's Lean journey.

If you don't have 20 minutes for meditation, you should.... do what? Does this classic Zen quote apply to Kaizen and continuous improvement?