KaiNexus: Continuous Improvement, Leadership, and More

In the United States, multiple estimates say over 100,000 people die each year in hospitals as a result of medical errors. There are an estimated 1.7 million care-associated infections each year and adverse medication events cause over 750,000 injuries and deaths per year. Beyond the human cost, if you look at the financial cost of these mistakes, we are looking at almost $20 billion annually.

Lean organizations target 8 types of waste in an effort to create the perfect flow of value to the customer. Ideally, no resources are used unnecessarily and every task contributes something for which customers are willing to pay. Of course, achieving this is much more challenging than just saying it. That is why a set of Lean tools and techniques have been developed to aid Leaders who embark on this journey. We would argue that software designed to support this type of improvement is crucial to success.

When we write the improvement cycle as linear, we start at P, which places the emphasis on the plan (noun) you intend to implement. But if P is understood to mean planning (verb), the emphasis is on first constructing a plan. Thinking of the P in this way, it becomes clear that you must first understand the current circumstances and make an honest appraisal of what can be done, given the way your organization works. In other words, when the cycle starts at Study, your Planning is much more likely to result in an ideal change - one that works and is workable to both address the issue at hand and be feasible given the way work is done. However, this leads to the question how much Planning should you do?

Gemba walks give leaders the opportunity to observe the processes that add value in their natural habitat. After all, talking about what happens on a factory floor or an emergency room in a board room is very different than observing work at the source. But like any other continuous improvement technique, the devil is in the details when it comes to Gemba walks. The best of intentions can be undermined by mistakes in execution. Here’s how a good Gemba Walk can go wrong.

Continuous Improvement in Education has been rapidly growing over the past couple years. Jake Sussman has recently talked about continuous improvement in higher education at KaiNexus, but one group that deserves mention is the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered by Congress in 1906, the Carnegie Foundation is an independent policy and research center that focuses on every level of education. The Carnegie Foundation is committed to developing a network of ideas, individuals, and institutions to advance teaching and learning. These stated missions and goals also mean that the Carnegie Foundation is at the forefront of Continuous Improvement in Education; they even hold an annual conference on Improvement in Education. This year’s conference is taking place this year in San Francisco, March 27th-29th.

Before they started using KaiNexus, JC Cannistraro used their own internal continuous improvement program, in which they tracked improvements with Google Sheets, but at some point this program went dead, flatlining in the number of improvements adopted over time. To combat this, they started using 5S training to make new improvements. Cannistraro stressed that the important thing 5S gave their teams a shared understanding of what they tried to improve, which in turn allowed them to see more opportunities for improvement. In fact, the result was too many opportunities to manage and soon a better solution was needed.

The education system in America faces an enormously complex set of challenges. Educators find themselves faced with community and government pressure to improve student performance, but often without corresponding funding or influence over policies and expectations. In short, our school administrations and teachers are being asked to do more with less. That is why it is not surprising to find that education professionals are turning to a business management approach that has proven very effective in other sectors such as manufacturing and healthcare.

Mark Graban interviews Karyn Ross, coauthor, with Jeff Liker, of the Shingo Award-winning "The Toyota Way to Service Excellence: Lean Transformation in Service Organizations." Karyn is doing a webinar on March 28 titled "How to Coach for Creativity & Service Excellence." To register, visit www.kainexus.com/webinars.

I was not up-to-speed on continuous improvement, or Lean, or any of those concepts. So I was learning with the organization, and basically they said, we are doing Lean, and here are the tools, go do it. Tools work, people use them, we do not really have a lot of overall vision or direction.

Those who have been working in and around construction for quite some time will know the construction industry has suffered deeply from a lack of innovation and systems improvement for as long as most can remember.