Making the Systems Work

On the 29th December 2017 I took my dog for a walk on a leash at 05:00 in the morning. As luck would have it, my dog, confronted by another dog, lunged forward, pulled me off my feet and I broke my hip. Hours later in the trauma centre in Harare, Dr Vera looked at an X-ray of my broken hip.

After asking how old I was, he told me that I needed a hip replacement. I asked him if he could do it.

“I can do it,” he said, “but I need to get a team together. It’s New Year’s holidays. A lot of people are away. I’ll see what I can do.”

On New Year’s Eve I was wheeled into the operating theatre at 8:15 in the morning. I saw a dozen people there before they put me under. All gowned and masked, expectant. Much later I woke as I was being wheeled back to my ward. I had a new hip. I have it today and I still manage to walk forty, sometimes fifty kilometres a week. Dr Vera and his team made the systems work for me.

You need to watch Dr. Atul Gawande in his TED talk on ‘How do We Heal Medicine’[1]

He tells us that medicine needs systems that work and check lists

***

Have you ever watched Formula 1 racing?

My son, Neville, got me interested a year or more ago. At the time I knew next to nothing. F1 racing was about cars going round and round a track, chasing each other. I had heard of Lewis Hamilton but that was about it.

Today I am still no expert on the subject. There are many things I am yet to learn. But one thing I do know is that if your business ran like a Formula 1 team, you would be a winner every time. At the moment Formula 1 is dominated by Red Bull Racing. Not long ago it was Mercedes and before that it was McLaren. Tomorrow it will likely be another high performance team. The competition is fierce. How do they do it?

Watch a Pit Stop team at work. Last Sunday at the Belgian Grand Prix it took 2.8 seconds for a Lewis Hamilton Pit Stop to change 4 tyres. Another Mercedes driver, George Russel was in and out of the pits in 2.7 seconds. The Red Bull drivers were in and out in 2.3 and 2.2 seconds respectively. The record by the way is 1.88 seconds.[2]

In Formula 1 racing 1/10 of a second can be the difference between winning and coming second.

What is it that the teams do?

·???????They have a team leader who understands the technology and is focused, committed, trusted, valued, with the skills and the ability to successfully lead and manage others

·???????They invest, heavily, in research and re-design of the machines

·???????They hire the best drivers, continuously develop them and pay them well.

·???????They hire a team and pay them well. They know that if one member of the team fails, the mission fails so they spend time and money selecting for attitude, not aptitude and then

o??They train them to perfection

·???????They create a strategy for every race depending on the track, the weather conditions, the macro environment and they plan for the possible changes

·???????They create check lists of what needs to be done, by whom and when. Not just for the race, but the pre-race

·???????And then they dissect what happened afterwards. It’s called Critical Incident Learning. What went well, what did not, how can we improve?

And in this way, the make the systems work.

Now it's your turn

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3QkaS249Bc

[2] The History of the Pit Stop (2016) - The A.V. Club (avclub.com)