I’ve written about gemba walks. Gemba is the Japanese word for “the real place” or that place where the work is done.
I am fond of a quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you are 1,000 miles from the corn field.” While I don’t know the specific context for the quote, it applies to business today. As leaders, unless we see the way work happens on the front line, we cannot understand the problems we need to solve and the barriers we need to remove. That doesn’t happen by just meeting in a conference room.
All hospital leaders were assigned to do at least three gemba walks this summer. The walks are supposed to be an example of each of the following:
- patient and family experience such as observing check-in
- front line staff experience such as shadowing someone or attending a unit’s daily huddle
- “break out of your silo” experience such as observing one of your downstream customers or walking a “value stream” (a high level view of how work gets accomplished across multiple departments and physical locations)
We are expected to Continue reading