…striving to stay ahead of the times.” This was the core philosophy of Sakichi Toyoda, founder of what is today’s Toyota Motor Corporation. While in Nagoya, our first stop during the Japan CPI trip, the Radiology team had the opportunity to tour Toyota’s Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology. This unique museum successfully takes you through Toyota’s early days of textile looms (late 1800s) to future focused human design. It was truly a rewarding experience for the Radiology team. We have included a photo showing six of our team members with their sketching pads at the ready.

The team sketched extensively throughout our time in the museum (see photo of Ray Ramoso hard at work). During our team debrief (an exercise every team participates in at the end of each day) we identified 3 key learnings from our museum visit: 1) The 3 Is of success - incremental, iterative improvement; 2) The power of the 7 design principles which include “flexibility in use” and “simple and intuitive”; and 3) start small with reliable methods - in other words don’t hesitate too long before you jump in and begin a cpi project or pilot. Speaking of reliable methods, this is one of the implications for the Radiology team at Children’s. We agreed that we need, as a pilot project, to pick a specific area in Radiology to begin focusing on reliable methods and to get on the road of incremental, iterative improvement. In addition, we resolved that we need to understand our current processes better by collecting and analyzing data and via first hand observation.

During our bus ride back from the museum our discussion always led us back to the core reason for Toyota’s great achievements - an unwavering belief that they could be successful. This was clearly demonstrated by Sackichi Toyoda’s son, Kiichiro, who in 1934 moved the company into car production when many said it could not be done by a Japanese company. What you realize when you go to Gemba and see Kaizen (continuous improvement) principles in action is that it requires a strong, long term commitment to continuous learning and improvement.

We look forward to learning about more ways to improve our Radiology value stream as our trip continues and sharing some of these learnings with you in our next blog entry.

The Radiology Team