tl;dr: The “two consecutive reds” rule persists because reacting feels like leadership — but it generates wasted investigations, false success stories, and eroded trust. Process Behavior Charts tell you when variation actually means something changed. I’m writing about something that…
Thanks to StoreSMART for being a long-term advertiser and partner here on the blog. Check out their useful products for Lean metrics boards, visual management, 5S, and other purposes. They offered to create a useful “safety cross” template and other…
Charts like this always make me wonder why we throw away the additional context of data from 2016 when we start the 2017 chart.
It's unlikely that January 1st in any given year is the magical creation of a new system or a new process. In other words, January 2017 was likely the same process as December 2016. The annual cutoffs are arbitrary. Sure, people are accustomed to thinking in annual cycles, but is this helpful for improvement?
Why do so many Lean efforts stall after early wins? In this episode, Darren Walsh explains why firefighting feels productive but prevents real progress–and how leaders can build daily routines and standards that sustain improvement over time. Scroll down for…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #521 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is José R. Ferro, PhD, a Senior Advisor with the Lean Enterprise Institute and the Founder and President of the…
TL;DR: A newly released Lean book from the Lean Enterprise Institute reinforces what Toyota, Deming, and Lean leaders have long known: psychological safety is essential for learning, problem-solving, and sustainable continuous improvement. Without it, Lean tools and training fall short.…
I’ve often been in a position to coach and counsel leaders who find it difficult to put the daily in what some call Lean Daily Management. I’ve been trying to fix my lower back by practicing yoga daily. There are…
Guest Post by Joe Swartz: At Franciscan Health, we were struggling to create a system-wide standard for our improvement boards. Although we had deployed them to over 50 departments across our 14 hospitals, it has been a struggle to agree on what the boards should look like. Five of our hospitals used rows for each key metric while nine of our hospitals used columns for each key metric. However, now our leadership was asking us to become more standardized across our system.
The other day, I saw a post on Twitter that included a few photos related to what's often called Lean Daily Management practices in a hospital.
The spirit of my post is not meant to come across as "they're doing it wrong" but more in the spirit of "they're doing a lot of great things, but it would be better if..."
If Lean Daily Management is supposed to be, at its core, about identifying opportunities for improvement, I'd hope they wouldn't be offended by my recommendations, but I also don't want to link to the Twitter post or call them out by name. I will pass along private feedback through a channel I have. But, I'm writing a post because what I see here is VERY common in different organizations (not just healthcare).
Today is one of those days where I think, "Forget what I have to say, read this...."
This being a LinkedIn post written by James Hereford, the CEO of Fairview Health Services in Minnesota.
"How huddles help us lead"
I think the "us" says a lot, instead of a headline about "How huddles help ME lead."
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.
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...
