DailyKaizen

Today I sat in on the kaizen that is underway around planning and execution around quality improvement.
The voice of a kaizen is a powerful one.
As I was listening in, I heard the group deconstruct some ideas that the team I am on came up with.
We came up with those ideas in a vacuum. So, let them be recast in a way that is most useful.

This week I am sitting in a kaizen in action and a kaizen in development. On both, I am on the management guidance team.
In both, there’s an undercurrent of tension around time. How many events can we have that take staff “off the line” and if we do, what’s the ROI for the issue the kaizen is addressing?
I think at some level that this is short term versus long term thinking.
Kaizen is as much an educational experience about how to do system change as it is about making the change. What did we do before kaizen? One day we won’t remember what we did before.

Here is a timely one from one of the smartest of them all:

“Any Intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the right direction.”

–Einstein

Next week is an exciting week for the organization for two reasons.  First, we will be conducting a very important Workshop that is the final of four that took us from a current to a future state.  The outcome of the Workshop will be a new model for quality improvement at the organization that has standard processes, from planning too execution.  While the model will need continued refinement moving forward I believe this Workshop will be a milestone of improvement for the organization and our patients.  Second, the CEO will be attending the Workshop for the duration as a team member.  He is interested in learning the process first hand, which I also believe will be a milestone for improvement for the organization if the Workshop is facilitated correctly.  I will be leading the Workshop and will do my best to post result on the blog as we overcome challenges and make progress.   

One of the teams that I am working with is having a hard time understanding how applying LEAN principles to their work will help them make improvements in quality and efficiency.  The team is made up of a group of managers with long tenure that have always been taught to maximize direct labor through batch and queue process and reliance on specialization.  Don’t get me wrong, the team is open to new ideas, but they are struggling with them.  Through weeks of process walks, data collection and training the team has gotten close to seeing the benefits, but the absolute proof of concept will only come through experience and application.  Thus, a leap of faith is in order.  I am hoping that I have prepared the team well enough to make the leap, and will find out on Friday when I ask for their commitment to move forward with the project.  If not, there will be many blog entries to come discussing my contingency plans.  Stay tuned…

Today I attended a ³Management Guidance Team² meeting facilitated by this blog¹s co-author. I attended an MGT with almost the same people about 3 months ago. This one was dramatically different. The Management involved was actively guiding. They worked as a Team. I know, it¹s cliché, but it was yet another sign of our progression along this pathway. We weren¹t discussing whether doing a kaizen was the right thing to do. We were discussing the best way to do it. The ideas were coming fast and strong. I felt content being quiet and let them do the thing that they are here to do. Lead. Nemawashi works.

I believe it was Albert Einstein that once said that the definition of insanity is solving the same problem over and over again. Creating a quality process is difficult and elusive. The time it takes to get to the route cause of errors and solve them is expensive and often intensive. Even so, it is worth the investment over the long-term. So often we hold our managers and staff responsible in making short-term outcome measures that we loose sight of the long-term costs in quality. As a result, over time our processes, while fast, often end up being greatly overburdened by poor quality. Staff ends up spending large amounts of time doing rework or unnecessarily over producing. What worse, as quality worsens we are forced to add Quality Assurance Steps to catch the errors we have not eliminated, and typically way down stream in the process. The solution is simple; we need to focus on slowing down to speed up. We need to make short-term investments that will solve long-term headaches.