Organize Visits to Best Practice Organizations for Leaders to “Go See Learn”
I’ll go anywhere as long as it’s forward.
—David Livingstone
Seeing is believing. Toyota promoted this concept by asking managers to “Go to Gemba,” which in Japanese means to go to the actual place of work where value is created. Taiichi Ohno, an executive at Toyota, led the development of the concept of the Gemba walk. Gemba walks denote the action of going to see the actual process, understand the work, ask questions, and learn. The Gemba walk is an opportunity for staff to stand back from their day-to-day tasks to walk the floor of their workplace to identify wasteful activities. Gemba walk is designed to allow leaders to identify existing safety hazards, observe machinery and equipment conditions, ask about the practice standards, gain knowledge about the work status, and build relationships with employees. The objective of a Gemba walk is to understand the value stream and its problems rather than review results or make superficial comments. Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber says, “The thing I’ve found in life is that the higher up you get in an organization the less you know about what’s going on.”
Promoting the same philosophy, “Go See Learn” was coined at Hospital Heal, where the operational leaders and the senior executives were encouraged to move out of their offices and go to different areas across the hospital; meet with staff and patients; and observe, listen, and learn about their work. Ask questions to verify, clarify, or amplify (learn more about) your understanding. Remember that curiosity and judgment cannot occupy the same place at the same time. Stretching the concept of Go See Learn further, it meant to go, see, and learn from the experiences of other organizations who had been on the lean path for a long time. As they say, “If you want to be a lion, train yourself with lions.”
Given below are examples of select few healthcare organizations that lean practitioners benchmark to demonstrate how maturity in lean application develops a culture of excellence.
Cleveland Clinic
Denver Health
Flinders Hospital
Kaiser Permanente
Mayo Clinic
NHS Bolton Trust
NHS Western Sussex Hospital
Park Nicollet Health Services
Seattle Children’s Hospital
St. Boniface Hospital
ThedaCare
Virginia Mason Medical Centre
Hospital Heal arranged site visits to ThedaCare in Appleton, Wisconsin, one of the pioneers in implementing Lean in healthcare, for senior leaders, physicians, directors, and select managers to create buy-in on the transformational journey (Figure 9.1). Subsequently, site visits were organized for the core team and value stream coaches to Go See Learn from other hospitals in the United States and Canada that were regarded as leaders in practicing patient-centered care, lean management, risk management, electronic medical administration record systems, etc.
Sensei Gyaan: Bring back the concepts and learning from your visits and customize them to support your organization’s culture. Don’t expect to replicate success through copy and paste.