Lean Blog Audio: Practical Lean Thinking, Psychological Safety, and Continuous Improvement

I've written about many of these ideas and themes before in various blog posts, but I wanted to consolidate my thoughts on the Lean concept of "standardized work" in a single place. This is partly for my own personal reference (and future linking), but also can prompt some discussion amongst my friends, the Lean Blog readers.

What We're Looking Forward to Learning at the Toyota Plant Tour Tomorrow, with the entire KaiNexus team, I'm going to visit the Toyota truck plant in San Antonio, the plant referred TMMTX. The 15 of us will be there in closed toed shoes and all other required clothing to learn about the Toyota Production System, Kaizen (continuous improvement), and Lean. I've blogged about it on the KaiNexus blog....

What the Book "Lean Thinking" Said About Healthcare in 1996 http://www.leanblog.org/audio244 When the book Lean Thinking (by Jim Womack and Dan Jones) was originally published in 1996, it seems likely that hardly anyone was applying Lean principles in healthcare. Sure, you had organizations applying TQM or CQI principles (or even some of the lessons of Dr. W. Edwards Deming). Joan Wellman did some...

The Response to the Hawaii False Alarm Can't End With Firing Someone -- This and other nuclear threats due to bad systems http://www.leanblog.org/audio243 Saturday, you might have seen the news about a "false alarm" push alert that was sent to many iPhones and other smart phones in Hawaii. An alert was also sent out over many TV channels through the Emergency Response System. Is the response one t...

Did Toyota's Mindset Really Leave the (Now) Tesla Building? Tesla builds cars in what used to be the NUMMI factory, a joint venture between Toyota and GM (which meant it was run as a Toyota plant with "Lean" practices). Before that, it was a dysfunctional GM plant. Now that it's a Tesla plant, did they learn from Toyota or does it seem more like "the old GM?"

A Powerful Message from Toyota's President, Akio Toyoda: No Best, Only Better In today's post, I share and write about this message from Akio Toyoda that was posted online: “Making Ever-better Cars and Human Resource Development: The Forces That Power Sustainable Growth“

Should #Lean Conferences Add a "Code of Conduct" for Speakers and Attendees? In today's post, I pose a question: Should the major Lean conferences adopt or adapt a practice that's now common at tech events, including Agile and Lean Startup events: a "Code of Conduct" for participants and attendees. Is this a countermeasure to a problem that doesn't exist in the Lean community? Or, is it still good...

#ChangeChampions at Franciscan St. Francis Health - in Supply Chain and Beyond Today, I'd like to share the second in my series of articles about "Champions of Change." Here, we feature my friends at Franciscan St. Francis, the health system of my Healthcare Kaizen co-author Joe Swartz. As I wrote about in the first article in this series, successful and innovative organizations have "champions...

I've been going through the book by the late Peter Scholtes: The Leader's Handbook: Making Things Happen, Getting Things Done. His work builds upon the legendary W. Edwards Deming and Russell Ackoff, among others. I often quote Scholtes (something also attributed to Peter Senge and others) as saying: "People don't resist change, they resist being changed." I think that's very insightful and that t...

Who are the "champions of change" in your organization? Is your CEO a champion of change? How many of your front-line managers and staff are champions of change? Are you? What does it mean to be a champion of change? Today, I'm sharing an article that I've written on this subject... and I'd love to hear your stories about champions of change. Please share your stories on Twitter or LinkedIn with t...

Of Course Doctors Hate Being "Excluded" From Attempts to Improve Thanks to those of you who sent me this HBR article: Doctors Feel Excluded from Health Care Value Efforts Long story short... brought to you by Bain consultants: Doctors don't like being excluded and organizational satisfaction goes up when you engage and include people. Brilliant! Obvious?

Come Join Me to Study Lean & Kaizen for Healthcare: Japan 2018 In the past year or two, it seems like I have heard more about people and organizations leading Lean study trips to Japan. This has gone on for decades, but there seems to be a resurgence. I first partnered with Kaizen Institute in 2012 to lead a "Lean Healthcare" study tour, we did another in 2014, and we're actively planning our next...

it's great to see an 11 year old thinking like an engineer and an entrepreneur. He's the son of a Toyota "operational excellence" consultant. For those who try to unfortunately equate Lean to a "clean desk policy," the father's desk is a great argument against banning family photos and an illustration of why Lean isn't about putting tape around everything...

The Lean Enterprise Institute (a former employer of mine from 2009 to 2011) has announced a new CEO, the third in their history following founder James P. Womack and his successor, John Shook. Their press release: Lean Enterprise Institute Names Eric Buehrens New CEO The start of the release: "The nonprofit Lean Enterprise Institute, a global leader in lean thinking and practice, today announced...

Three or four months ago, in the midst of a discussion on LinkedIn about patient safety, somebody made reference to a 1966 cover story from the magazine "Look." Look was a very popular competitor to "Life" and the "Saturday Evening Post," so this was written for a very general public audience. The cover tease reads: "OUR HOSPITALS ARE KILLING US An alarming report on conditions in many American ci...

Free Webinar Today on #Lean Collaboration Across Companies and Industries I hope you'll join me today for a KaiNexus webinar that I'm hosting. The topic is near and dear to my heart (as well as to others at KaiNexus): collaboration, learning, sharing. Effective Collaboration Across Organizations and Industries Our presenters will be Teresa Hay McMahon, the Executive Director of the Iowa Lean Con...

Texas Hospital Saves Money Occasionally With Lean Six Sigma... But Can Do More, More Often? I saw this headline the other day about University Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas: "UMC finds savings through waste"

This Organization Chose Not to "Deploy #Lean" Because a Leader Thought it is Not Customer Focused? I posted an article on LinkedIn last week as a companion article and summary of my podcast with Dean Gruner, MD, the recently retired CEO of ThedaCare. That article: "A Retired Hospital CEO Shares the Employee Feedback That was 'A Bucket of Cold Water to the Face.'" There have been over 125 comments...

I've long been appreciative of the work that Toyota does, through their non-profit TSSC subsidiary, to help non-profits and community organizations improve. The latest example of that is some work done at Children's Health in my other backyard, in Dallas: "Children's Health Joins Forces with Toyota to Improve Patient Safety and Quality of Care" As it says in the release: "Through a collaboration w...

One challenge with teaching Lean is that there isn't aways a consistent definition that's used by everybody. Some of the definitions are really bad. Some of them are just different from others. Let's start with "different." Is a lack of standardization in definitions of Lean a problem?

I'm excited to announce that the audiobook version of our book Practicing Lean is complete! It's available for purchase via LeanPub.com and it might be available through other channels in the future. The audiobook is nearly seven hours of audio, which is the entire book, completely unabridged. As per the LeanPub.com approach, you can choose your own price. The suggested price is $24.97, but you c...

Let's start by stating the obvious: it sucks to wait 24 hours or more on a stretcher in an emergency department hallway waiting for a real hospital bed. It's sad and frustrating to have a couple of blog readers from Canada send me this story from Quebec: Quebec wants 24-hour cap for patients waiting on stretchers in ERs Barrette says there would be consequences for hospital staff, doctors who don'...

This is an elaboration on something I originally posted on LinkedIn. I saw somebody touting an approach that would guarantee "maximum efficiency for your management gemba walks." Ah, the efficiency trap. Is efficiency really the goal here? Efficiency is usually defined as outputs divided by inputs. Visiting more departments more quickly would increase "efficiency." Shouldn't the goal there be "max...

Any rare event creates a number of challenges when it comes to manufacturing and supply chains. We're seeing a pretty historic "spike" in demand for products like the inexpensive glasses that allow one to safety view the eclipse (our friends in the totality zone can look at the totally-eclipsed sun safely, but that's the only time). You could call it "supply chain challenges" or a "lack of plannin...

Highlights of "Boss Level Podcast" - Gen. Stan McChrystal and the Book "Team of Teams" I've read most of retired General Stanley McChrystal's excellent book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (I start a lot of books and finish a few). Amazon reminds me that I bought the book just over two years ago. I meant to blog about it and never got around to it (I have a lot of ideas...