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Focus on Variation:
Exploit Variation

Sometimes it is not obvious how to reduce or eliminate variation. Rather than just accepting, or "dealing with" the variation, we can think of ways to exploit it. This change concept deals with some ways to turn the negative variation into a positive method to differentiate our products or services.




Examples of Tests of this Change

The health care industry in the mid-1990s could see that new regulations were going to a force changes in the way they ran their organizations. But there were so many proposals they could not predict what form the U.S. health system would take. One large health care organization decided to exploit this variation. They developed tests of all likely scenarios in various parts of their organizations. This not only let them learn how the organization would adapt, but also allowed these tests to be conducted under a wide variety of conditions.


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