Toyota Lean

I have been watching management "fads" come in to health care over the last number of years. Almost every one of them seems to be capable of being viewed either reductively or as an aspect of complexity; and most have been applied in both ways as well.

Quality Improvement, TQI, Balanced Scorecard, Patient focus, Leadership development, purchaser provider, performance management, the Learning Organization, and now "Lean Toyota" can all be seen as recipes to be applied to fragmented and dysfunctional organizations and systems. They can also be seen as new ways of thinking that incorporate much of what this group has been calling "complexity."