A Post-Mortem on a Different Hospital Lean Journey

Today's post is an addendum from Saturday's post on the apparent death of a health system Lean program: "Why Would a New Healthcare CEO Kill a Lean Program?"If you read that post, there's an interesting comment from a Presence Health employee that doesn't shed too much more light on this: "From the standpoint of a current Presence Health Employee~ my opinion is that the RIEs failed because they were aggressively site specific. At a time when PresenceHealth is "Becoming One" I do not believe the RIEs took the entire ministry into consideration when planning events. Decisions and "experiments" where being made and conducted through a site specific lens, and this was often in contradiction to the spirit of the new organization." As I commented in response, I'm not sure why a goal of common processes or a health system that's actually a system would be a reason to stop with Lean. Unless hopefully they are really just re-booting the effort instead of killing it altogether. As I alluded to in the post Saturday, there was a sad story about ahospital that I featured in the 2008 1st edition of Lean Hospitals that basically killed their promising program when a new CEO was hired from the outside. As Adam Zak, one of the top Lean-focused executive recruiters said, it's a shame that the board (apparently) didn't hire a CEO with Lean experience.