Adventures in Medicare and Other Systems Thinking Principles

by Dwayne Phillips

It is only healthcare and security in old age. Not very important, huh?

In the recent past, I joined Medicare (yes, I am that old). Let’s see, just go to a government website, fill in the blanks, and viola’. Well, being a technically savvy person, I did that, or tried that.

All this required the Social Security Administration one month to learn what my name was.

Then the Social Security Administration required one month to learn my address.

Then the ten-minute process of signing up took a few hours in person. Well, I am exaggerating, as this all took much more than “a few hours” in person.

And what does this have to do with this blog, technology, systems, and managing work and leading people? Well, all the systems that broke down during this exercise were built by people working for leaders of people and managers of work, i.e., US.

We built systems that didn’t manage to connect the dots on ASCII characters that folks type into computers. Close is not close enough in all this. Okay, we don’t want auto-correct to correct small errors in data entry as that may be worse, but how about auto-warning, auto-suggesting, or simply flashing red lights that show there may be a data-entry error? How about improving the people who are in the system via improved hiring, improved training, and all the other things we could improve? How about this and that and all sorts of other things that smart folks can do when they give themselves the time to be smart?

Perhaps that is the conclusion: we are smart folks, let’s act like it. We can do better,