Gotta Go Lean Blog

Patient Satisfaction and Lean

Why Patient Satisfaction Metrics Are Bad for Healthcare

Patient satisfaction metrics are bad for healthcare. There. I said it. I know. It is blasphemy to say something like that in the Lean world. The focus of continuous improvement should be on the customer. The customer tells us if we are doing something right by speaking with their wallets. The wider the wallet opens, the more satisfied the customer is. Sure, there are surveys and awards and reports on patient satisfaction, but those metrics Read more…

The Perception of Activity

We want people to stay busy, right? Idle people are wasteful, right? In Lean, these are both false. I would rather see a person sit idle than just try to fill the time with busy work. Busy work masks opportunity. It is understandable that people do this. If they sit still, typically two things happen. The first is that their boss comes over and chews them out for sitting around. We’ll talk more about who Read more…

Lean Lessons From the Seattle Snowmageddon

I grew up in Chicago. When it snowed, we had to get drifts over a foot to get school cancelled. At least that’s how the school-aged kid inside of me remembers it. But I do know that we had some pretty bad storms. During the storms, things shut down, then got back to normal pretty quickly. I also remember that we’d just finish digging out our driveways, and the snowplows would come by and bury Read more…

Granting Autonomy to Your Team

Many people have fairly solid leadership skills. But those skills are put to the test in a continuous improvement culture. Typical leadership is not enough. The people in charge must exhibit improvement-oriented leadership. This simply means that they not only guide people to accomplish today’s task, but also have to consider how they will do that task better in the future. For many, the hardest part about changing the nature of their leadership style is Read more…

Follow Your Processes to Prevent Chaos

Processes are important for many reasons. They improve productivity. They make quality better. They improve predictability. They also help prevent chaos. Think about what happens when a driver chooses not to follow a process. We know that this can cause trouble if the violation is self-serving: speeding, running a red light, etc. But most people don’t realize that it causes problems even if the person is trying to be helpful or kind. When you try Read more…

Heading Off Emotional Responses

I recently got a comment from an ex-subscriber that was not very flattering. While some of the criticisms were valid—I do have some issues with my download delivery processes—there was also an accusation that I was conducting false advertising. That bothered me, and I had a pretty quick reaction. But then I stepped back and thought about an old model I worked on for my book a while back. This model shows what happens inside Read more…

Not Recognizing Problems Exist is a BIG Problem

I teach a lot of problem solving tools. In fact, much of continuous improvement is just various forms of problem solving. Most of the tools are just standardized solutions to problems that most people face in their jobs. Take andon lights, for example. The first person who came up with the system likely saw that getting people to help at a workstation quickly was a problem, and probably went through several iterations to get what Read more…

Ease of Making Changes vs. Willingness to Change

The ease of making a change is correlated to the willingness to make a change. This is a critical concept to understand when trying to create a continuous improvement culture. A big part of a CI culture is the expectation that everyone contributes. Great Lean companies have participation from people at all levels of the organization. The willingness of people to actually make changes is a function of several factors. I’ll leave the concept of Read more…

Sometimes People ARE the Problem

I see a lot of talk in Lean circles about blaming the process and not the person. The truth is, people fall on a spectrum for most skills and characteristics. I’m not sure if it is a bell curve or some other distribution, but with nearly all traits and skills, there is a pretty large cluster of people in the middle, and then some outliers on both the really good side, and the really bad Read more…

Value-Added Work Quick Check (Video)

When looking at an operation, if you are trying to help make it better, you will need a few tricks in your toolkit to be able to make quick judgements on where to spend your time digging deeper. I don’t advocate ever taking any significant action without a clear, data-based understanding of the situation. But there is the very real challenge of figuring out where to spend your limited time. Simply put, as a consultant Read more…

My First Question When I Am Doing Lean Consulting (Video)

I am often asked about how I go about helping a company get started on its continuous improvement journey. When I am acting as a consultant, I generally view that as the wrong question. There’s one question I like to ask before the ‘how’ that has probably the highest correlation to success of any question I ask. I ask “Why?” I want to know about why the company is taking on the challenge of creating Read more…