Lauren Macy, Senior Project Manager, IHI
Choosing and defining your measures might sound easy, but those two tasks cause problems for improvement teams all the time.
In the first video in this activity, Lauren Macy explains how to participate in the activity and what you’ll need for materials. In the second video, Lauren talks to Rebecca Steinfield, an IHI Improvement Advisor, about what participants can learn from the game and how those learnings apply in real improvement work. You can show these videos in a group setting to help you facilitate this activity or watch them by yourself ahead of time.
Part 1: How to Play the Banana Measuring Game
Read the video transcript.
Part 2: What We Learn in the Banana Measuring Game
Learning Objectives: At the end of this activity, you will be able to:
Recognize the value of measurement within the Model for Improvement.
Discuss the importance of developing a clear operational definition for an improvement measure.
Identify at least two simple ways to test an operational definition.
Discussion Questions:
- In your own words, what is the purpose of measurement in improvement?
- Why is it important to have a shared definition of a measure among members of an improvement team and the staff who are collecting data?
- How would you find out if you have defined a measure well enough to be clear to all the people who are collecting data?
Richard Scoville, IHI faculty, created this activity to help teams learn about operational definitions for measures.
