Lean Blog Audio

Forgive me for being a bit of an Industrial Engineering geek here in this post. After all, my bachelor's degree is in Industrial Engineering, even though I sometimes get called "a healthcare guy" after focusing on healthcare for just about ten years now.One of the things we learned about in our IE organizational psychology class was something called "the Hawthorne Effect." In the past few months, I can recall maybe three different occasions where somebody referred to the Hawthorne Effect in a positive light, as in: "We'll have to see if the data improves, maybe we'll get the Hawthorne Effect." People have meant this in a positive light in the context of the flow of the conversations. I remember somebody almost bragging that the improvement in an area was due to the Hawthorne Effect. I cringed... that's not really anything to hope for. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

Dr. W. Edwards Deming advised against relying on slogans and posters as a way of trying to improve quality.Point 10 of his famed 14 points said: Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the systemand thus lie beyond the power of the work force. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

http://leanblog.org/audio43 You might know my friend Karl Wadensten, the president of VIBCO, a small manufacturer in Rhode Island. I've interviewed him for episode #84 of my podcast series (which was also episode #10 of my video podcast series).I've had a chance to visit his factory a few times (mostly in the 2009-2011 timeframe). Each time, I've been impressed with the visible employee enthusiasm for improvement and the way VIBCO has used Lean to meet business objectives of better customer service and performance. Then, and over time, I've been impressed with Karl's transformation into a Lean leader. Beyond VIBCO, Karl has been a tireless proponent of Lean for the state of Rhode Island. These efforts have led to Governor Gina M. Raimondo supporting Lean and signing an executive order that will mandate the use of Lean principlesand methods in state government. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

have been going through some old papers recently and I found two sheets of paper with hand-written thoughts or "truisms" that I had scribbled down in early 2002. The word truism, it turns out, doesn't mean "true" so much as it means "a statement that is obviously true and says nothing new or interesting." Oops.This was a list of things I had learned after two years at GM, two years at MIT, two years at Dell Computer, and just over a year at a startup. These aren't all original thoughts, by any means, but I had written them down when I was in between jobs (the startup had a real cash crunch after 9/11).If Twitter had existed, I might have tweeted many of the thoughts on that paper. Not all of them are under 140 characters, but here some of the things on that sheet from 13 years ago. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

http://leanblog.org/audio41' I hope you might have access to this interesting article from the Wall St. Journal: "Toyota Veteran Rises to Corporate Office From Factory Floor." I was able to access it while logged out from my WSJ account.Mitsuru Kawai, pictured, started working at Toyota in 1963, at age 15. After 52 years of employment, Kawai is going to be in the position of senior managing officer, "the highest position ever held by a blue-collar worker in Toyota's eight decades," per the WSJ. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

http://leanblog.org/audio40 Every time I am in a hospital or clinic setting, one of the first things I do is get a pump or squirt of gel or foam from a wall-mounted dispenser to clean my hands.Or, I should say *try* to get hand sanitizer. For one, it's important to practice proper hand hygiene when entering or leaving a unit, for my sake and the patients (and to practice what I preach, a secondary concern). Secondly, I'm testing to see if the hospital's support processes work well - isthe dispenser actually not empty? It's usually not difficult at all to find an empty gel or foam dispenser on the wall. Sometimes, the first one I try is empty (as are others). Sometimes, I have to try a few... but there's almost always an empty one. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

http://leanblog.org/audio39 Joe Swartz and I have been planning the first-ever workshop (a conference of sorts) where people can come see what a Kaizen culture, or a culture of continuous improvement, looks like at his health system, Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis.It's designed to be a small event. We have ten people registered right now, with a few more committed, and we have space for up to 25 people total. You can still sign up and attend on April 22 (full day) and April 23 (half day). Learn more at http://leanblog.org/audio39. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

http://leanblog.org/audio38 When people ask me why I do what I do, my first answers are:improving patient safetycreating better workplaces for people It's as simple as that. Those are the important problems that I'm passionate about (and have been able to help fix, at least in some local situations). At a more global scale, too many patients are hurt or killed by preventable medicalerrors. Too many people end up hating their jobs or going home crying or exhausted at the end of the day. That needs to change. In my 20-year career, in manufacturing and in healthcare, Lean has been a powerful and effective methodology for meeting those goals, along with improving quality, reducing waiting times (for products or for care), and reducing cost. But, not always. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

Last Monday, I had the chance to attend a Lean Startup event in Austin where Eric Ries announced the launch of a Kickstarter project for a new book. 10 days ago isn't much of a "throwback," but bear with me.He was asked a question from the audience: "Do you wish you had used a different name than Lean Startup to resonate more broadly?" Before we get to Eric's answer, I thought back to me asking Jim Womack that same question about the term "Lean." When I worked for LEI back in 2009, I asked Jim casually and he said basically, "It's just a word" or something like that. But, I got a longer response to this question from Jim back in Podcast #118, in 2011 (which makes it more of a real throwback now). --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

http://leanblog.org/audio36 When we introduce the idea of Lean to healthcare organizations, it's very common for somebody (often a senior physician) to say something like,"But we don't want assembly line medicine." The implication is that assembly lines and factories are cold, rigid, uncaring places that focus on ruthless efficiency and making the numbers at the expense of safety and quality. Do a Google search for the term and the implications of "assembly line medicine" are very negative. It's also a bit of a "red herring" (or is it a "straw man") for them to bring up assembly lines when we're in agreement (I hope) that our goals are to improve safety, quality, waiting times, cost, and staff morale. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

Today's Throwback Thursday is a look back at a 1993 book that I purchased in 2011 on somebody's recommendation. It was probably one of those used books you can buy for a penny on Amazon... Creating the New American Hospital: A Time for Greatness. It's indeed available for a penny today.I had flipped through the book at the time as it was interesting to me to get more context on how hospitals are not just suddenly in crisis (financial or otherwise) in recent years. Book-NAHChapter 1 of the book is titled "Why Hospitals Fail." The author says, "Clearly, something isn't working." --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

http://leanblog.org/audio34 OK, so it’s not the kind of scientific research that involves lab coats and microscopes, but I’m doing some research that I’d like your help with. I’m looking to do some research and some interviews for writing projects related to two different topics: Understanding Variation and Reducing Blame. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

Back in 2002, when I worked for a software startup called Factory Logic, I was able to sit in on some Lean training that was created and presented by a large electronics manufacturer that will remain unnamed (and it wasn't Dell). The class was for that company's suppliers, primarily... --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

http://leanblog.org/audio32 This week is the annual Patient Safety Awareness Week, presented by the National Patient Safety Foundation, a non-profit that I like and support. As Lean thinkers, I hope we'd recognize that the amount of patient harm and death that's caused by preventable medical errors is a huge problem around the world.When we ask "why is there so much harm?" there are many answers - causes and root causes. There's no simple answer to the question of why so much harm occurs and why, sometimes, it seems like not enough progress is being made. One contributing factor, I think, is the lack of public awareness aboutthis problem and the scale of it... --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

One of the two main pillars of the Toyota Way management system is "respect for people." I've blogged about that often over the past ten years, including this post.Lean provides a philosophy and a management model that should be nothing but good for staff and patients. The idea of "respect for people" might sound nice in principle, but what does it mean in a practical sense. Respect for people can be illustrated in these ten ways, and more: --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

As often happens, I have too many open browser tabs full of articles that I was going to potentially blog about. Too much WIP (a problem that Jim Benson will discuss in our upcoming Boston workshop).So, it’s time for me to clear out my backlog and to share some articles I’ve been reading with some quick notes, instead of full blog posts. Well, I got my backlog down by three. I’ll try again next week with some shorter blurbs about more articles, perhaps. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

http://leanblog.org/audio29 Some of you might know that I'm on the board of a Texas-based non profit, the Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation. It's an important organization that helps patients, family members, and hospitals work together in the name of better care and safer care.One of the ways the Foundation helps is their publication "The Batz Guide for Bedside Advocacy." You can get a free PDF version or get a free iPad app version that does even more than a book can. Or, another option is to buy a paperback version via Amazon, which basically just covers costs and shipping. The Foundation gives away a lot of Guides, but I think that the ROI of a hospital or employer purchasing Guides would be overwhelmingly positive (in addition to the core human benefits of protecting people and saving lives). More on that later in the post. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

This article caught my attention the other day, primarily because I like scotch, whisky (and whiskey and bourbon). The Japanese love scotch whisky and have long produced a product that's a variation of scotch -- Japanese whisky (the lack of a standardized spelling for whiskey is an endless debate). I'll settle on "whisky."The article: Japanese Whisky Got a Lot of Hype, But Can One Bottle Really Be the Best? Now, you might not care about "the brownest of the brown liquors" (Simpsons reference), but there's an interesting detail in the article about the Kaizen mindset of continuous improvement. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

Here's another video in the series that Joe Swartz and I shot at Franciscan St. Francis Health back in October. See them all here or via a YouTube playlist.You might remember pharmacy manager Ronda Freije from two previous videos. Here, she talks about a concept called "Seven Days' Grace." It's a concept that Joe Swartz and I wrote about in Healthcare Kaizen using stories from Franciscan (see excerpts via Google Books). --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

Today's post is hosted over at LinkedIn, as part of my participation in the LinkedIn Influencers series.The post is titled: "The One Thing Google Should Show When You Search for a Hospital." It's not about Lean per se, but it's about topics that I hope we'd agree are relevant: Transparency of quality and patient safety data Making that data easily available and understandable by patients Using that data to hopefully make better decisions about where we get care Hoping that data, transparency, and choice puts positive pressure on every health system to get better. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support