Mark Graban
Recent Posts
Reducing Specimen Contamination: Did the Improvement Last?
November 9, 2026At St. Luke Community Healthcare in Montana, routine monitoring revealed a significant problem with contaminated urine cultures. In 2025,...
Is Your CI Team Too Good at Solving Problems?
November 5, 2026At the AME 2026 International Conference in Milwaukee, I went to a session from OhioHealth whose title is a bit of a math problem: "Scaling...
Don't Wait for Employees to Speak Up. Ask Them.
November 2, 2026A vice president I was coaching went with me to an emergency department to learn more about the work and the problems employees were...
ISO 9001:2026 Calls for a Quality Culture. How Would You Know You Have One?
November 2, 2026A technician reports the same defect for the third time. The supervisor is under pressure to meet a production target. Does the supervisor...
Using AI for Continuous Improvement: Removing Digital Waste at KaiNexus
September 3, 2026One defunct podcast host left 70 broken audio players across the KaiNexus website. The obvious and known fix was to replace them one at a...
The Lean Audit You Haven't Run on Your Own System
August 17, 2026If you lead continuous improvement, you spend your days coaching other teams through Lean thinking. Standardize the process. Make the work...
How CI Leaders Can Make a Stronger Case for Funding
July 17, 2026Why can a strong, and capable, continuous improvement program still struggle to secure or maintain funding?
That is the question Jeff...
The Manager Who Got Kaizen Down from a Day a Week to an Hour a Week
July 6, 2026A new manager went to Joe Swartz, then Director of Business Transformation at Franciscan St. Francis Health, with a problem. Kaizen was...
Why Effective A3 Authors Need Permission to Fail
June 29, 2026Taiichi Ohno was famously direct about experimentation. The story most people know is the one where he drew a chalk circle on the factory...

