Get Better, Faster!
Employee-driven innovation “one bite at a time”
“We couldn’t call ‘time out’ to become a Lean organization. Our staff had to learn and improve while serving patients.”
—Maria, clinic quality improvement director
Chapter at a Glance: High-pressure environments where “stopping to improve” isn’t an option demand different approaches to innovation and change. This chapter, in the words of a tireless change leader, shows how complex improvement methods can be made accessible and deliver quick wins when combined with a nimble process for engaging employees.
LATE AFTERNOON at our clinic brought the usual scene: patients lined up outside, packed reception area, staff scrambling to keep pace.
This was worlds apart from my previous role. I’d left a well-staffed hospital system team for a solo mission at a rural health center serving the underserved—recent immigrants, non-citizens, the uninsured. My goal: adapt the Lean methods that transformed my prior workplace to help my new team of dedicated but overwhelmed professionals.
The Lean tools I brought could help. My hospital ran week-long Kaizen events—Japanese for “continuous improvement”—where teams would spend five full days analyzing and fixing complex processes. But that was with Lean experts and adequate staff coverage.
My new team was different—mostly young professionals in their first jobs, working fixed salaries rather than hourly, with packed schedules. Their dedication ran deep, many sharing immigrant backgrounds with our patients, which created natural empathy and trust and refreshingly, less resistance to change than I’d faced before.
Learn about the creative solution for making change and innovation work in a fast-paced, time constrained workplace.
