I didn’t expect that our family trip to Florida would end with me driving a plane load of passengers nearly 200 miles to their homes, but it did.

During the early 2000s, Allan Goldman, M.D., a chief physician at the Great Ormond Street Hospital, a children’s hospital in London, observed that too many mistakes were being made when patients were transferred from surgery to ICU.

As we settle into a new year, it’s a good time to take stock of last year and look on the horizon at what’s ahead. I want to focus on what’s really important: U.S. manufacturing.

Editor’s note: Mike Micklewright will be a guest on Quality Digest Live, on Feb. 28, 2014, at 11 a.m. Pacific/2 p.m. Eastern.

At Modus we now have a posted, dominant project at all times. We post it as a large sticky note on the wall. This is the banner saying, “If you pull something and have any choice whatsoever, pull it from this backlog.”

Over the years, I’ve observed a number of efforts at various companies to implement A3 problem solving, an approach based on the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle that summarizes the problem and solution on a folded form, usually 11 in. × 17 in.