It’s a sunny day and I realize that my laptop screen is viewable whilst sitting in the garden!
I am now three quarters the way through my Foundations in Improvement Science for Healthcare (FISH©) course. It has been a revelation to say the least. The last time I blogged on my progress I remarked that memories of operational struggles whilst working within my various senior leadership roles have become clearer as to why we had some success and plenty of failure in terms of sustainable difference around the three key wins. These are improved quality, productivity and motivation. This feeling has most definitely continued!
The course so far has taken me through the general concepts using the Three Wins Design®, plenty of the people stuff that is fundamental to success and on the last few ‘study’ occasions the more technical stuff of what it takes to understand how a system is functioning. In other words how to build up a picture of the root causes for the outcomes from the system, how to analyse the data and present the data so that it is information and finally how potential design changes can be tested to reveal how the root causes can be reduced to achieve a balancing act around the three wins. So I am becoming more confident in the use of value stream maps that set out how work is done and how resources are used and presentation on a process template. What this does is to remove rhetoric; intuition and frankly some guess work that is all too common when tackling operational challenges. The notion of cycle times that can help to explain why outpatient clinics, day case units etc can be a less than positive experience for patients by simply setting out the process on a Gantt chart is wonderful to see as it changes perceived complexity into a simple picture.
I am feeling more motivated than ever to complete the course as the power to resolve challenges becomes more and more obvious. This is despite the fact I am being tested to grasp the concepts of schedules, standard work, hand offs, Pareto analysis, the 80:20 heuristic and how to present demand, workloads and resources in a consistent manner. This is not easy for somebody who does not naturally occupy this type of space!
So why the Chimp in me? Whilst completing the course I am reading an interesting book called the Chimp Paradox by Dr Steve Peters. He sets out his thoughts on how the brain functions and how to manage your chimp. Your chimp is the emotional part of the brain that will tell your human or logical part you can’t do something or ask why would you want to learn something new that could make you look daft. Well my chimp is feeling settled and untroubled at the moment because of the combination of the achievement and the huge potential I see in using improvement science. All this adds up to, I want to learn some more of this stuff. Oh and the sun is still shining!
Steve Peak