October and December Cohorts Enrolled

We have enrolled two A3 Thinking cohorts beginning Monday and Friday! We are excited to work with this great group, and hope you will support them to learn, engage and improve!

How have A3 Thinking Workshops evolved, and what are expectations now?

  • Pre-Read Managing to Learn and Humble Inquiry
  • Pre-Identify a Problem aligned with True North with a Sponsor or Supervisor
  • Attend: Day #1 (Oct 23 or 27th), then Day #2 30 days later (Dec 4 or 5)
  • Attend Weekly Learning Labs to:
    • Create a Swimlane/Process Map
    • Complete Analysis and PDSA
    • Catchball with a Coach
    • Catchball with Stakeholders and Sponsors
  • Submit Complete Draft within 30 Days
  • CME Certificate Issued after Submission of Draft

Future Workshops: If you are interested in enrolling leaders from your team, please see the link below.

For More Info: https://zsfglearn.org/a3thinking

Thank you for your leadership!
Will Huen, David Smith & the A3 Thinking Team

Standard Work and Poster Templates in Toolbox

Standard Work – Many of A3 practitioners have tested improvements of processes using PDSA but are looking for tools to describe, stabilize, share and improve upon those changes. We have added standard work templates to this website and will be creating a new learning lab to teach and support creation of standard work.

Leadership Academy Poster – To support our Quality and Leadership Academy Teams, we are posting a powerpoint template of the Academy Poster. The poster is designed to showcase implementation of a problem solving plan using a version of A3 called an A3-Status Report.

New A3 and Analysis Tool Templates

In the A3 Toolbox, we have added a refreshed A3 Template and a Powerpoint document with several analysis tools that can be included into the A3.  Our KPO is testing a number of similar templates and guides, and we welcome you to share your successful tools with us as well! 

We hope you find this useful and welcome your feedback, questions and ideas!

A3 Thinking Update – June/July Cohort

On July 25 and 27th, we had a great class of 49 ZSFG and SFDPH Leaders complete our A3 Thinking Course. In the next 30 days, trainees are asked to: 

  • Catchball A3s
  • Attend Learning Labs on Analysis or Possible Countermeasures
  • Continue to map or collect data 
  • Catchball A3 with sponsor
  • Submit one complete draft to the KPO by September 1!

Introducing Our A3 Thinking Website

We are excited to announce this pilot website.  Our goals are to support leaders to continue learning, practicing and implementing A3 Thinking.  We will attempt to keep this site updated to share our best thinking about:

  • What is A3 Thinking and why is it important?
  • What are we currently doing to support new and existing A3 practitioners?
  • What are the templates and tools we are using?
  • What are we doing to continuously improve our use of A3 Thinking to achieve True North?

Thanks for checking us out. We welcome your feedback, questions and ideas!