Insight

By which I do not mean 'ways to spice up that book you've been writing for the last ten years.'

I'm always taken by people who find ways to apply methods from one industry to a completely different one, so its probably not too surprising that I was intrigued by an article in the November issue of CIO Magazine about an unlikely alliance between a hospital and a racing team. The hospital is Great Ormond Street hospital in London; the racing team is Ferrari. The link? The hospital was seeing a surprising number of deaths in their neonatal cardiovascular surgery division. Perplexed and stunned, the surgeon who was encountering this string investigated the possible causes, and - the good news - he was able to account for about half of them, frequently due to specific medical conditions that made the child a high-risk candidate for the surgery. But the bad news was, there was no apparent reason for the others - they just failed; no one knew why.

This is where the Ferrari link came in. The surgeon was a fan of racing, and, noting that the Ferrari racing team was able to execute a number of quick changes in a startlingly brief period, wondered why they were able to get it right every time, but the hospital, with much higher stakes, could not. The hospital contacted the racing team, and came to find that the key was that on the racing team, everyone knew exactly what they were supposed to do, and who was in charge. Every likely and not-so-likely occurence was thought out in advance. As one of the Ferrari people said, if it was raining, they'd plan to have the wet-weather tires on hand, just in case the driver decided to switch without warning. It's tougher, of course, in the hospital, but even there, it became obvious that failures occurred because they didn't track what did fail, and make plans to handle it, if and when it happened again. They instituted processes to handle the failures -- what you might call the 'routine' reasons for failure -- and their failure rate went down. And it all started because the surgeon liked racing. Here's one of the articles that talks about the background of this series of events.

Of course, it wouldn't have been quite as sexy if they said that failures went down when they consulted with a human factors organization -- which is where Ferrari pointed them -- would it? And Process Improvement is such a grindingly dull phrase. But its how Toyota made its cars better.... how Ferrari made its racing team flawless... and how this hospital found out why patients were dying, and what could be done to limit that most catastrophic failure.

I suppose it's a little banal -- wow, problems have causes, and if you look hard enough, you'll find them -- but I think its significant. Whether its cars, racing, surgery, or getting the damn checkbook to balance -- problem have causes.

Okay, thats my insight for today.