Author Archive | Foster Thompson

Deploying Improvement Habits: From Starter Kata to Meta-Habits

Test. From its popular rise in manufacturing in the 1980s, lean thinking has reached nearly every business sector, including service industries and healthcare. But for many organizations and their executives who embrace lean concepts, the results have been, at best, modest, and, for some, complete failures. The reasons for lean implementation failures are as numerous […]

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Developing Meta-Habits at Baptist Memorial Memphis Hospital Emergency Department

In the improvement world, Kata is the deliberately practiced thinking routine that turns repetitive mental activities into an unconscious meta-habit: As described in yesterday’s blog, a learner is guided by a coach(Improvement Kata) and answers a series of questions from the coach(Coaching Kata); a second coach frequently observes the learner/coach interaction and offers guidance. With […]

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