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

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 trip in early 2018.

Click here to learn more via a web page that I run. You can also click here for a PDF that previews the 2018 tour. Registration has not yet opened, but contact me if you'd like to be notified with details.

The dates are February 26 to March 2, 2018. Details are still being finalized, but the tour would start in Tokyo and end in Nagoya. The plan is to not just visit some hospitals that are leaders in Lean and quality improvement practices, but to also visit Toyota and some other world-class organizations.

The trip costs 5400 euros, which is currently about $6300. This cost includes everything from the start of the tour on Monday morning to the end on Friday evening. Your airfare to Japan and back is a separate, independent cost to you.

In the past two trips, we've had a very international group (a majority of attendees have been from Europe and Asia). This creates a special opportunity to not just learn from our Japanese hosts, but to compare notes and learn from others around the world.

Our trips are intentionally a mix of hospital visits and other types of organizations that we can all learn from. It's great to see a Japanese hospital with a CEO who has been leading their quality and continuous improvement efforts for 20+ years and to hear their perspectives. At the same time, the hospitals we have visited were, at the time of our visits, relatively new to formal "Lean" practices - as they were building upon their "Total Quality Management" engagement and improvement practices... something that was NOT a fad for these hospitals or their leaders.

These trips are rich learning experiences. It's not just the formal visits, but the time talking on buses and trains, the meals together, and the networking and sharing that, for me, has continued with attendees long after the week is over.

Here are my past blog posts about visiting Japan, with a few links below.

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 the appointment of Eric Buehrens as its new CEO. The appointment took effect October 1, 2017.

A proven lean thinker and leader, Buehrens led lean transformations at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he served as COO and Interim CEO, and at Reliant Medical Group, a Massachusetts group medical practice, where he was COO."

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 cities"

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 Consortium and one of the ILC members, Stephanie Hill, Corporate Continuous Improvement Manager at Kreg Tool Company. Kreg is, coincidentally, a KaiNexus customer.

It's at 1 PM ET, but if you can't attend it live or didn't see this post in time, you will be sent a link to a recording if you register.

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"

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 so far... but one has me scratching my head.

It read:

"I looked at deploying Lean within our PNO, and ultimately decided against it, in part for two reasons:

because Lean is about doing the same thing, albeit better and

it is not as much customer/outwardly focused as we need in healthcare."

Lean is not customer/outwardly focused? I hope this isn't a widespread perception or belief out there. I hope I'm overreacting to something that's not really a problem... but I wrote the post anyway.

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 with Toyota, Children's HealthSM, the leading pediatric health system in North Texas, announced today it has successfully reduced rates of central line-associated blood stream infections (CLABSIs) by 75 percent with patients in the gastroenterology unit."