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

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).

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.

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."

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.

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...

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...

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:

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.

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.

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.