“A picture is worth a thousand words…, “ an idea that is universally recognised, frequently used in business, but not often seen where it might have most impact – Senior Executive/Board meetings. Descriptive text still dominates most senior level reports, often using ‘corpspeak’; a peculiar form of jargon developed by people like *The Head of […]
Visual Management. Theory, Case Studies and the Reality of Sustaining Improvement
Maintaing progress and sustaining improvement (continuous or otherwise) can be difficult. Here’s a tale of how the reality dawned upon me while I was sitting in a hospital bed (a few years ago). A while back I was involved in training about continuous improvement methods. One of the main methods we looked at was visual management. […]
Florence Nightingale; the mother of Infographics? (btw she was also a nurse…)j
Recently I’ve had a few interesting conversations around this exchange: Question, “What did Florence Nightingale do? ” Typical response, “She was a Nurse……(of course!)“. But….. “did you know she was also a mathematician? In the 1850’s produced a remarkable graphic showing the causes of death of hospitalised soldiers during the Crimean war. The graphic convinced Parliament to […]
Why don’t Car Dealerships use the Lean Thinking from the Manufacturing Process?
Please drop your car off between 8-10am and collect between 4-6pm… This is on the heels of recent posts about customer services. This morning, in the pouring rain and a howling gale, I dropped my mother’s car off at the garage for repairs. I hadn’t been there for about 7 years but was instantly reminded […]
Flipchart foraging and why its worth trying the Draw Something app
One of my pastimes is checking out the abandoned flipcharts I find in the variety of offices and meeting rooms I get to frequent. It’s quite a revealing pastime (possibly about me unfortunately). Occasionally you do stumble across sensitive material, obviously this goes straight in the confidential waste bin, or back into the hands of […]
Ricoh Gemba Mat, the best of Ohno Circles, Gemba Walks and Employee Engagement.
Gemba Mat is an improvement tool which combines the ideas behind Ohno Circles, the Gemba Walk and enhances them through employee engagement. I think it is incredibly effective, not just as an improvement tool but also in how it engages and develops people. I saw Gemba Mat in use at Ricoh in Telford during an […]
Hand Sanitisation (washing) and visual management in hospital
This is another experience to come out of my visit to hospital. I couldn’t help notice how much effort had gone into 5S and visual management on one of the wards. Good news I thought as I’d heard a lot about how it is being used to improve effectiveness in hospitals. 5S (sort, set, shine, standardise, […]
Kaizen! Toast v Beer, Who Wins?
I love You Tube, it a great resource for sharing and learning but sadly not widely used by public services (in many organisations it’s blocked, like most social media). I’m also quite interested in beer, so this grabbed my attention, particularly when you throw in Kaizen. Amongst the dozens of You Tube videos on Kaizen, […]
What's the PONT 