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

http://www.leanblog.org/audio274

I find it really interesting when scientific facts and truth get superseded by new evidence. Science isn't supposed to be stubborn… it's OK to cast aside the old status quo when we learn something new (pay attention, “flat Earth” crowd).

There are a lot of these themes, also, in a book I've been reading, The Case Against Sugar, by Gary Taubes. Some of the established science about low-fat diets being good for us might not really be true.

How does this all apply in medicine and our practice of Lean?

I haven't read it, but Marie Kondo's book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing has been a pop-culture phenomenon the past few years.

I've seen some compare her process to the Lean practice of “5S.”

Kondo says you should only keep an item if it “sparks joy.”

Here's an interesting column from Becker's Hospital Review, written by Michael Dowling, President and CEO, Northwell Health.

I'm guessing he created the headline, since the phrase “give a damn” doesn't appear in the article:

Who are the CEOs he is speaking to who do NOT give a damn? What inspired him to write this?

Yesterday's blog post was about a situation (with my podcast hosting service) that triggered memories of my time at General Motors in 1995. Today's post is about a recent article on Boeing that definitely caused me to think of that broken, dysfunctional “pre-Lean” culture that I suffered through (and learned from) in my first year at GM.

In 1995, nobody claimed GM was Lean so the expectations were low. They were who they were and my new plant manager in 1996 started to change things. Boeing is a company that has been pointed at as a great example of Lean Manufacturing, so it's troubling to read reports that suggest otherwise.

From the New York Times:

Episode #270

Ever since I started podcasting in 2006, I've been using a company called “Hipcast” to be the “hosting” company for the podcast audio files and feeds. For those of you not familiar with podcasting, that's the website where I upload podcast audio files… and they then serve those files when requested by services like Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

This has been an aggravating week or so, since Hipcast has been having a lot of technical issues going back to last Tuesday or so. Their website has been down, the podcast feeds (RSS feeds) have been broken. People haven't been able to listen to my podcasts unless they had already downloaded the episodes through their app.