Humble Advice for Leadership of Lean Healthcare
Posted by Chris Holland on Wed, Oct 05, 2011 @ 11:07 AM
response to a Mark Graban blog on Lean ( http://bit.ly/qB8ref )
Nice article Mark. Your comments and those of John Toussaint, Conal, and Al are apropos of the ongoing challenges we in healthcare face in adopting and even more importantly, sustaining Lean principles within our organizations and within the industry as a whole.
They can all be summed up in the word "Leadership."
The challenges of Leadership in Healthcare becomes the challenge to Lean:
1. Constancy of Purpose and Profound Knowledge (two of Deming's favorites) is often lost in the cacophony of marketing and branding terms designed to sell improvement methodologies and techniques.
We are all here to bring value to people's lives around their health and wellbeing. When the language, tools, methodologies and overarching brand of improvement becomes more dominant, the core purpose gets pushed off center stage.
As a result, when the environment demands a dramatic shift in strategy and healthcare model, top leadership looses connection to the Lean tools and methods that they come to see as "not up to the task" of mastering the new challenge.
2. Strategic Imperatives: Engagement of the people closest to the work and the service, likewise begins to be treated by leadership as a "nice-to-have" component of survival rather than a "must have" of the new solution. Continuous Quality Improvement got thrown overboard in the past when leaders began to see it as the method for the middle or front line of the organization, not for the senior level challenges of competitive positioning, capital investment, payor management, profitability, and more.
Lean gives us another chance as an industry to infuse our organizations with the core improvement principles articulated by Deming, Drucker, Berwick, Womack, and others, and by companies like Toyota, GE, Ford, Intermountain Health, Harvard Community Health Plan, JCAHO, and ThedaCare.
My concern is not "can we adopt it?" I know we are and will continue to do so. My concern is "will we sustain it?" and "will we continually improve its effectiveness" in staying on top in the never ending leadership challenge of improving the value created by our healthcare institutions.
My humble hard-earned wisdom: Lean (like "a rose, by any other name") must be infused into the fabric of the work of Boards of Directors, Executive Teams, and Medical Leadership in our healthcare institutions and small businesses if we are to build value and maintain steady momentum as an industry.
Required Blog Tips:
1. Infuse Lean into the fabric of the work of Boards of Directors, Executive Teams, and MEdical Leadership.
2. Lean is here to support the success of the institution, its customers and its Executive Leadership, not the other way around.
3. Make sure Lean Sensei's understand the business of healthcare.
4. The biggest waste is created by leadership. Eliminate Strategic Waste (ill conceived acquisitions and mergers, poorly planned investments, reactive strategic distractions, and more)
5. Don't just study Lean. Profound Knowledge and Sound Judgement, critical for success includes business, strategy, economics, demographics, science, and more, is built continually by leadership not crammed like the preparation for senior finals.