Lean Training Games in the OR

Just about everyone learns best by doing. A pilot, for example, needs to complete some classroom work, but much of the training will take place in the air and at the controls of a plane. This is good, but also time and fuel consuming, and a potentially risky use of an expensive resource, the plane. For that reason and more, commercial pilots log time in a flight simulator. While the simulator is not identical to actual flight, it is a valuable and much cheaper substitute for flight time. Dangerous procedures can be practiced over and over in a simulator, without putting the pilot and the hardware at risk, until the pilot response becomes muscle memory .
Lean training often includes hands-on exercises to demonstrate important Lean methods. In this case the term simulation refers to a classroom exercise that mimics the functioning of a real-world system, but in much less time and much less effort. Some common Lean simulations include the Batch Versus Flow exercise, where students will build a classroom product in batch mode and then in flow mode, and compare the results. These exercises can be real eye-openers for the students, because the performance difference between the two scenarios is so great. In the case of the Batch Versus Flow simulation, the same number of units can be built (with the same number of people) in flow mode in 1/10th of the time needed to build them in batch mode.
Another eye-opening simulation included in this book is the Par Versus Kanban simulation in Chapter 1. If your hospital is using the Par Level method, and most are, you will be shocked at the difference between it and the Kanban method. Spoiler alert: Kanban wins!