Saving sight with production principals.

I am very much in favour of speedy innovation that takes big steps and sometimes leapfrogs processes. That often brings me in surroundings and into a position where I get into discussions with ‘counterpartners’ that talk about ‘lean-management’ as the holy grail, and the only way to go.

I really don’t think there is such a holy grail, (even leapfrogging nor open innovation is not), as there has to be a mix of several ‘tools’ (since that’s what all of these are in my opinion) to be used, depending of the situation, challenge or even culture.

Whenever I express my vision on the often too sturdy- approach from ‘lean-guru’s’ there is ‘some’ comment.

A lot of the principles being issued have been developed and crafted by one company : Toyota. I think everyone in business knows a lot of work came from their thinking, and with continuous process improvement they were able to work themselves into a crucial role of history of the current age. This process is often referred to as the Toyota Production System (TPS)..

Recently Toyota teamed with great filmmakers to tell some of their stories with a series of films they are calling The Toyota Effect. The video shot at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center about Liseth; a patient with diabetes for 15 years losing her sight, resonated a lot with me.

Most afraid of never being able to see her family again, she turned to the eye clinic. Because the hospital had a waiting list of hundreds of patients long, the situation for Liseth got worse and worse. They struggled to lower the waiting lists with all kinds of projects, but due to higher demand, it did not have the impact they wanted it to.

Knowing Toyota has been in the area of improvement of processes, the hospital partnered with Toyota. They came in and first started to observe together with some staff members what actually was going on around the process in the eye-clinic. Creating a situational awareness of the staff on where the improvement potential was, it changed the culture into a continuous improvement department.

With lessons learned from Toyota’s knowledge of production processes, within 2 years or so, they have managed to significantly reduce the waiting list each day in the eye-clinic.

Working in healthcare innovation, seeing this video brought back to me the principals of improvement through the observation of process. Something we do a lot in our Service Design Approach, but this video and some of the others in The Toyota Effect film series, boosted the importance of it. I would encourage you to see some of the films yourself, they have made some great ones with multiple organizations.

#disclosure : This post was created in partnership with Toyota.