Things go wrong
There is small stuff that goes wrong and there is big stuff that goes wrong.
Size matters
We are taught to focus on the big-ticket items, to seek out the silver bullets and pull the big levers.
Think big not small
Focus on revolution not evolution
We are told not to get distracted by the minutiae. We have plenty of big problems to worry about.
The problem with minutiae
Is that our organisations are chock full of it. Minutiae that goes wrong every day.
- Orders are misplaced
- People get confused
- Priorities aren’t clear
- Deliveries are late
- Tools get lost
- Handoffs are poor
If you spend an hour or so looking at how the work flows through your business you will find lots of minor irritants and issues.
It is the sum of the small stuff that causes the big problems
- Customers churn because they have to wait too long
- Quality falls because the process “almost” works
- Costs rise because staff waste time
And the really big stuff that goes wrong — the hideous incidents where millions are lost or people die — happens when lots of small problems all line up at the same time. Like the planets around the sun.
If you want to stop the big issues fix the small problems.
Small stuff is easy to fix
- It doesn’t need big investment — just attention to detail
- Your staff deal with on a daily basis –-so fixing it does wonders for morale
- There is a lot of small stuff so it is predictable — it is easy to find
A small amendment to the rule
Make sure you focus on the most common, most irritating, most costly small stuff. Use the Pareto Principle and fix the biggest small stuff first.
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Image by Kit
Totally agree, James. Fixing the small stuff adds up, without a doubt. From a customer experience perspective, fix the biggest small stuff that matters most to the customer first. When we’re just starting out, those are easy quick wins… but they have an impact.
Annette :-)
This is the reality in some work I’m doing in theatres. Repeated, predictable stuff around not being quite ready, not having the paperwork collated, not making sure the blood results are back, not sending the porter on time, not offering the patient the chance to go to the loo BEFORE the porter arrives, and so on, all add to a bigger than necessary gap between procedures.
Add together those increased gaps and the time lost is enough to do an additional case every day. EVERY DAY. 365 patients a year, waiting longer than they need to, to have their broken bone fixed. For some of those patients, it could lead to an earlier death. It’s both trivial and massive.
And the solution being foisted upon you from on high is no doubt a new IT system?
Thank you for your comment Adrienne
Not if I have anything to do with it! The standard solution is generally to criticise staff for being so bad at their jobs, but against a backdrop of having as many locums/agency as staff because recruitment is a nightmare in the NHS, that’s a hard one to pull off!
We’re looking at removing the barriers to performance, making it easy to do the right thing. It’s tough with a constantly shifting workforce, but that seems so far out of our control (pay, conditions, Brexit etc) that we just have to suck it up and do our best.
Complex systems are so chopped up into little pieces that the staff inside them have no sight of the other parts, or the impact of their actions. Bringing them together to talk about it is starting to make inroads….