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

The blog post It’s 9 p.m. in an operating room, just before the last procedure of a long day that had been full of delays. A nurse sees that the surgeon is about to make an incision without first stopping for the expected “timeout,” a crucial step that helps the team confirm, among other things, that the correct surgery is about to be performed on the correct side of the correct patient. The nurse is also concerned they don’t have enough units of blood on hand for this type of procedure.  The nurse pauses and wonders, “Should I speak up or keep quiet?”

Exploring the philosophy of learning from mistakes using Shingo and Bodek's insights. Emphasizing process improvement and mistake-proofing for zero defects. Evolution from fool-proofing to mistake-proofing in manufacturing.

The podcast discusses the process of using Chat GPT to summarize the book 'Measures of Success', focusing on the benefits for marketing and concerns about public access. It explores key concepts in organizational metrics, process behavior charts, data variation types, process improvement connections, and practical application of data analysis techniques with real-world examples.

I'm excited to announce that I've registered for Katie Anderson‘s Japan Study Trip in November! Read the blog post.Between 2012 and 2019, I visited Japan five times, and I learned something new each time. I've been really itching to go back. I'm excited to see and learn new things with Katie and her team!!It's a great opportunity to deepen your understanding of Lean and the Toyota Production System. Visiting Japan helps one understand which of the broader cultural elements of the country contribute to a Lean workplace.But it also helps you understand that not all Japanese companies are made in the Toyota mold. Toyota has worked very diligently to cultivate its culture and practices over time. And our organizations can do the same.

Exploring the significance of mistakes in various environments and the valuable lessons they offer for growth and improvement. The podcast delves into error prevention in healthcare, with a focus on mistake-proofing methods to enhance patient safety. Emphasizing the need to differentiate between process and innovation mistakes, and the importance of learning from process mistakes for improvement.

The blog post What do Boeing frontline mechanics and engineers think about this day? What did they expect going into it? How did the day turn out? I'd love to know. “Quality is made in the boardroom.” I rolled my eyes hard when I read this announcement from Boeing, as part of the aftermath of the January 5th door plug blowout incident on an Alaska Airlines flight: In recent years, there have been many complaints about the Boeing culture. Culture starts with the executive suite. They're responsible for the culture, and they're responsible for the results of bad decisions made in the boardroom or the remote C-suite. Or they should be responsible. W. Edwards DemingBoeing to hold Quality Stand Downs

Blog post link I loved a recent New York Times article about Chef Gordon Ramsay, including this part: “Ramsay said that when he makes a mistake, he owns up to it. He has been candid about the misjudgments that led to the closure of Amaryllis, his fine dining restaurant in Glasgow, and admits that he has opened restaurants that were “badly conceptualized” or opened in the wrong area. “You should never be embarrassed of failure,” he said. “But never make the same mistake twice.”

Blog post For a long time, I've heard the phrase “the hidden factory” used to describe various forms of waste in a factory, including rework operations and activity. I was surprised to hear Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun refer to this in a news story using a similar phrase, “shadow factory.” Boeing Wants to Close Its ‘Shadow Factories.' It Would Be a Positive Step.

Read the blog post As I recently shared on LinkedIn, I really appreciated the annual shareholder letter that was published and shared by Larry Culp, who has been CEO of General Electric for just over five years now (the first-ever outsider CEO in their 125+ year history). Read the full letter here. I've also archived it here as a PDF. First off, I can't help but notice that the photo shared at the end of the letter is not a corporate headshot of Larry in a power suit and tie. It's a photo from a "gemba" (or factory floor) with him wearing safety glasses, a casual shirt, and a high-visibility vest. He certainly looks to be in his element and enjoying it. How rare is that amongst CEOs of manufacturing companies of any size? How much better off would other manufacturers (or healthcare organizations) be if they had CEOs who don't just sponsor or support Lean, but are instead leading and driving the culture change? How many hospital CEOs truly enjoy donning PPE to be at the frontlines of patient care?

Blog post This post is built around excerpts from the book The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation. Read more about Toyota, including stories and key lessons learned in the book. Download a free preview of the book From the book: Fear and punishment drive people to get better at hiding mistakes when they could channel that energy into preventing them. When they can't be hidden, repeated mistakes illustrate how punishment accomplishes nothing beyond deflecting blame from leaders. One of my heroes, W. Edwards Deming, who also deeply influenced Toyota executives, shared what may be the most important recommendation in his famed “14 Points for Management”: “Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.”[i] Driving out fear means, in part, that everyone can feel safe to speak up about mistakes and improvement ideas, as discussed in Chapters Five and Six. Leaders can also alleviate the fear of making mistakes, to begin with, when they combine the right methods and mindsets. Starting with mindset, as former Toyota leader Darril Wilburn says, “It's a leader's responsibility to create a system in which people can be successful.” Therefore, it's the leader's responsibility to drive out fear. This includes creating work systems where it's easier to do the right thing and more difficult to make a mistake. This responsibility doesn't fall solely on the shoulders of leaders. They also engage their team members in designing effective mistake-proofing methods. Mistake-proofing, or “poka yoke” in Japanese, is a core method within the Toyota Production System. It's a mindset based on the idea that people want to do good work but are imperfect. So, leaders have an obligation to help. You might not think of Toyota as an entrepreneurial company today, but it started small in 1926 as a manufacturer of weaving looms based on patents held by founder Sakichi Toyoda. One of his key innovations was a mechanism that would automatically stop a loom when a thread broke, preventing it from cranking out more defective cloth. This innovation also led to huge productivity increases. One worker could now oversee upward of 30 to 50 machines, walking over to respond to problems when they were detected instead of having to hover over a single machine continually. Toyota originally used the phrase “baka yoke,” which means “idiot-proofing.” Many decades ago, that term upset a Japanese factory worker who, correctly, complained that they weren't an idiot. We should also avoid saying “fool-proofing” or “dummy-proofing,” regardless of how often we hear them spoken around us. Professor John Grout, the former dean of the Campbell School of Business at Berry College, is an expert on mistakes, receiving some of his early education in the field from Toyota leaders. He thinks mistake-proofing should be called “slip-proofing,” as it's easier to prevent execution errors than bad decisions (planning mistakes). One common slip is closing a file without saving it. The “Are you sure?” dialogue box tries to protect us, but as John points out, we're likely to click “Yes” out of habit. That's a slip on top of a slip–one that's hard to prevent. Using software that continually autosaves your work eliminates that risk (to my benefit, as I write this book in Google Docs). This post originally appeared at mistakesbook.com.