The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance, Second Edition

Spreading Improvements

A team of physicians, nurses, and staff of a large primary care clinic developed a system to drastically reduce the amount of time physicians were behind schedule seeing patients in the office. The team had tested the changes with some success. They communicated the changes involved in the new system around the clinic. Two months later, they were discouraged to find the system had not been implemented by any other teams in the clinic.

Although it is difficult for even one team in a primary care clinic to test and implement changes that result in improvement, the difficulty and complexity increases when the aim is focused on multiple teams or multiple clinics. People in manufacturing or in the service industry face ...