Last week I shared a link to Dr Don Berwick’s thought provoking presentation at the Healthcare Safety Congress in Sweden.
Near the end of the talk Don recommended six books, and I was reassured that I already had read three of them. Naturally, I was curious to read the other three.
One of the unfamiliar books was “Overcoming Organizational Defenses” by the late Chris Argyris, a professor at Harvard. I confess that I have tried to read some of his books before, but found them rather difficult to understand. So I was intrigued that Don was recommending it as an ‘easy read’. Maybe I am more of a dimwit that I previously believed! So fear of failure took over my inner-chimp and I prevaricated. I flipped into denial. Who would willingly want to discover the true depth of their dimwittedness!
Later in the week, I was forwarded a copy of a recently published paper that was on a topic closely related to a key thread in Dr Don’s presentation:
understanding variation.
The paper was by researchers who had looked at the Board reports of 30 randomly selected NHS Trusts to examine how information on safety and quality was being shared and used. They were looking for evidence that the Trust Boards understood the importance of variation and the need to separate ‘signal’ from ‘noise’ before making decisions on actions to improve safety and quality performance. This was a point Don had stressed too, so there was a link.
The randomly selected Trust Board reports contained 1488 charts, of which only 88 demonstrated the contribution of chance effects (i.e. noise). Of these, 72 showed the Shewhart-style control charts that Don demonstrated. And of these, only 8 stated how the control limits were constructed (which is an essential requirement for the chart to be meaningful and useful).
That is a validity yield of 8 out of 1488, or 0.54%, which is for all practical purposes zero. Oh dear!
This chance combination of apparently independent events got me thinking.
Q1: What is the reason that NHS Trust Boards do not use these signal-and-noise separation techniques when it has been demonstrated, for at least 12 years to my knowledge, that they are very effective for facilitating improvement in healthcare? (e.g. Improving Healthcare with Control Charts by Raymond G. Carey was published in 2003).
Q2: Is there some form of “organizational defense” system in place that prevents NHS Trust Boards from learning useful ‘new’ knowledge?
So I surfed the Web to learn more about Chris Argyris and to explore in greater depth his concept of Single Loop and Double Loop learning. I was feeling like a dimwit again because to me it is not a very descriptive title! I suspect it is not to many others too.
I sensed that I needed to translate the concept into the language of healthcare and this is what emerged.
Single Loop learning is like treating the symptoms and ignoring the disease.
Double Loop learning is diagnosing the underlying disease and treating that.
So what are the symptoms?
The pain of NHS Trust failure on all dimensions – safety, delivery, quality and productivity (i.e. affordability for a not-for-profit enterprise).
And what are the signs?
The tell-tale sign is more subtle. It’s what is not present that is important. A serious omission. The missing bits are valid time-series charts in the Trust Board reports that show clearly what is signal and what is noise. This diagnosis is critical because the strategies for addressing them are quite different – as Julian Simcox eloquently describes in his latest essay. If we get this wrong and we act on our unwise decision, then we stand a very high chance of making the problem worse, and demoralizing ourselves and our whole workforce in the process! Does that sound familiar?
And what is the disease?
Undiscussables. Emotive subjects that are too taboo to table in the Board Room. And the issue of what is discussable is one of the undiscussables so we have a self-sustaining system. Anyone who attempts to discuss an undiscussable is breaking an unspoken social code. Another undiscussable is behaviour, and our social code is that we must not upset anyone so we cannot discuss ‘difficult’ issues. But by avoiding the issue (the undiscussable disease) we fail to address the root cause and end up upsetting everyone. We achieve exactly what we are striving to avoid, which is the technical definition of incompetence. And Chris Argyris labelled this as ‘skilled incompetence’.
Does an apparent lack of awareness of what is already possible fully explain why NHS Trust Boards do not use the tried-and-tested tool called a system behaviour chart to help them diagnose, design and deliver effective improvements in safety, flow, quality and productivity?
Or are there other forces at play as well?
Some deeper undiscussables perhaps?