There was an interesting article on Radio 4 this morning. It stated that NHS spends £2bn a year on patients who visit their GP when they don’t need to. 1 in 5 GP visits fall into this category. The most common reasons are colds, back pain, headaches and indigestion. All of which could be treated […]
Soviet Style Savings
We make life complicated We add new products, new services, extra checks and balances. It is easy to do. Somebody wants it. But we rarely take things away, remove services, cut stock keeping units, rationalise organisation structures. That is hard to do. Nobody wants it. Unfortunately all that complexity is, well, complicated; and consequently expensive. […]
Just Following Instructions
Bureaucracy is bad; it is hopeless when people just follow the instructions to the letter. They can’t help but mess it up. Think of the last interaction you had with a call centre, chances are it was horrific. Check-lists are great; it is super when people just follow the instructions to the letter. They can’t […]
Legal Eagles
The BBC ran a story yesterday about the effectiveness of the jury system. A two year research programme looking at 68,000 verdicts has been undertaken. They came up with the following statistics: 70% of jurors said they understood the judge’s instructions. 31% of jurors actually could recall the judge’s instructions. 48% of jurors could recall […]
KISS
I bought a train ticket to London over the internet, it cost me £131.00. I decided to pick it up at the station rather than pay to have it delivered. At 6:15 in the morning I entered my 8 digit code into the machine only to be told that I also needed to insert the […]