The process you use to develop your strategic plan is as important as the plan itself. That’s why many organizations turn to the Hoshin Kanri approach, which focuses on creating a plan that takes into account both the daily management of the organization and the tactics necessary to reach those goals that will have the most significant impact. The result is a set of specific action plans and resources necessary to achieve your business breakthrough.

Although some organizations tweak the approach to meet their specific needs, most often the Hoshin Kanri planning process consists of the following seven steps.

I received an interesting call a few weeks back from Bahnsen Miller, MD. Bahnsen is an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Virginia Health System. He attended LSU School of Medicine and completed his residency training there. After residency training, he completed a quality improvement and patient safety fellowship at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge—this is where he learned about KaiNexus. Since then, Bahnsen has been working with residents and students on various quality improvement and patient safety initiatives.

He asked me if I had ever thought of using KaiNexus to help train physicians during their medical school and/or residency periods. It brought back a flood of memories from how my “improvement story” began.

Much of the information published about establishing a culture of Kaizen is written for leaders who are introducing the concept to their entire organization for the first time. But once the Kaizen mindset is established, the job is not done. Looking for opportunities for positive change may be second nature to your long-term employees, but many new hires will have no knowledge of Kaizen or daily improvement. Without a plan for familiarizing these new team members with Kaizen, your carefully developed culture can quickly become diluted. That's why it is critical to bake Kaizen into your employee onboarding process. Here are our top tips for doing precisely that.

Let’s be honest, it can be difficult to get people excited about the subject of business process improvement. The phrase itself has no personality, no flair.

Of course, we know that continuous improvement and innovation are requirements for success in today’s hyper-competitive environment. One way to get teams excited about business process improvement is to bring meaning to it using an inspiring motto or catchphrase that gives life to the idea. You can choose one and use it as the theme for your business process improvement efforts, or offer a new bit of inspiration every week.

Of course, you can invent your own, but we’ve found some quotes from business leaders and others that might do quite nicely. Here are a few. 

It's hard to believe that the first half of 2020 is in the books. Just kidding. I don't blame you if you feel like there's been 10 years worth of news in the last six months. It's been intense. COVID-19 has impacted every American to varying degrees and much has changed about the way we live and work.

This year, more than ever, it makes sense to do a mid-year check-in with every employee. Despite the challenging situation, continuous improvement driven by every team member is still essential.

By asking the right questions, you might uncover ways that leaders can provide better support for staff members trying to make the best out of difficult circumstances. Here are a few we recommend.

Maybe Albert Einstein was talking about continuous improvement when he said, “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Too often, we see organizations struggling to measure only those things that can be tied to a dollar amount and they, unfortunately, neglect the impact of ALL improvements. Let’s have a look at the top six ways to measure the impact of your organization’s improvement efforts.

The more conversations I have with people, the more it is apparent that everyone doesn’t yet understand that they need to wear a mask when they go into a public place (grocery, gas station, etc).

Here is a great short explanation and here is a great long explanation. 

In order for everyone to be on the same page about universal-public-mask wearing, we need to change the meaning, the intention, the belief, and ultimately the relationship we have with wearing masks. 

To do this let’s change the meaning of wearing a mask. Let's start making mask-wearing a...

• sign of respect for others as well as a sign of politeness

• signal to everyone that you are taking this seriously

• way to decrease the spread of Covid when you are asymptomatic

• reminder (and a barrier) to not touch your face when you are outside so you don't get infected

Many conversations about our fight against the Coronavirus imply that combating the virus is unnecessarily destroying the economy. Or, said another way, to preserve the economy, we need to relax our fight against the virus.

Sign up for today's webinar to find out how much you know about COVID-19 and learn the answers to what you don't!

How long are we going to be physically distant?

I don't know the future but since so many people ask me, I would like to give you my thoughts on how this is going to play out eventually. If you haven't had a chance to read about the Hammer and the Dance yet, I recommend you go read this first. I really like that terminology and visualization, and it is a model that we are hopefully starting to follow in this country.

We are not going to be physically distant forever. At one point the cost-benefit ratio of distancing will no longer be in balance. There are costs of remaining 100% distance forever (for instance, the economy will go from a recession into a depression, and there will eventually be wide scale social/mental collapse).

On the other hand, there is a cost to remaining 100% social (lots of people dying unnecessarily because our healthcare system will collapse). We are going to end up somewhere in the middle. I personally think the Hammer will be in terms of weeks, and The Dance will be in terms of months - if we can get our act together.

We’ve been writing a lot about physical distancing lately, as this has proven to be the most effective way to slow the spread of COVID-19. Without limiting social contact, we don’t have a chance at slowing the spread of the infection - which means an overloaded healthcare system and a lot of unnecessary deaths.