{"id":471,"date":"2010-09-25T09:11:13","date_gmt":"2010-09-25T09:11:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.saasoft.com\/blog\/?p=471"},"modified":"2010-09-25T09:11:13","modified_gmt":"2010-09-25T09:11:13","slug":"the-plague-of-niggles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/?p=471","title":{"rendered":"The Plague of Niggles"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Historians\u00a0tell us that in the Middle Ages about 25 million people, one third of the\u00a0population of Europe, were wiped out by a series of Plagues! We now know that\u00a0the cause was probably a bacteria called Yersinia Pestis <\/em>that was spread by fleas\u00a0when they bite their human hosts to get a meal of blood. The fleas were\u00a0carried by rats and ships carried the rats from one country to another.\u00a0 The\u00a0unsanitary living conditions of the ports and towns at the time provided the ideal conditions for rats and fleas and, with a superstitious belief that cats were evil,\u00a0without\u00a0their natural predator the population of rats increased, so the population of fleas increased, so the likehood of transmission of the lethal bacteria increased, and the number of people decreased<\/em>. A classic example of a chance combination of factors that together created an\u00a0unstable and deadly system.<\/p>\n

The Black Death was not eliminated by modern hi-tech\u00a0medicine;\u00a0it just went away when some of the factors that fuelled the\u00a0instability\u00a0were reduced. A tangible\u00a0one being the enforced rebuilding of\u00a0London after the Great Fire in Sept 1666 which gutted the medieval city and\u00a0which\u00a0followed the year after\u00a0the last Great Plague in 1665 that killed 20% of the population.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The story is an ideal\u00a0illustration of how apparently trivial, albeit\u00a0 annoying,\u00a0repeated occurences can ultimately combine and lead to a catastrophic\u00a0outcome.\u00a0 I have a name for these apparently trivial, annoying and repeated occurences – I call them Niggles – and\u00a0we are plagued by them. Every\u00a0day we are plagued by\u00a0junk mail, unpredictable deliveries, peak time traffic jams, car parking, email storms,\u00a0surly staff,\u00a0always-engaged call centres, bad news, bureaucracy, queues, confusion, stress, disappointment, depression. Need I go on?\u00a0 The Plague of Niggles saps\u00a0our\u00a0spirit just as\u00a0the Plague of\u00a0Fleas sucked our ancestors blood.\u00a0 And the Plague of Niggles infect us with a life-limiting\u00a0disease –\u00a0not a rapidly fatal one like the Black Death – instead we are infected with\u00a0a slow, progressive, wasting disease that affects our attitude and behaviour and which manifests itself as\u00a0criticism,\u00a0apathy and cynicism.\u00a0 A disease that seems as terifying, mysterious and incurable to us today as the\u00a0Plague was to our ancestors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

History repeats itself and we now know that complex systems\u00a0behave in characteristic ways – so our\u00a0best strategy\u00a0may\u00a0the same – prevention. If we use the lesson of history as our guide we should\u00a0be proactive and focus our attention\u00a0on the\u00a0Niggles. We should actively seek them out; see them for what they really are; exercise\u00a0our amazing ability\u00a0to understand and solve them;\u00a0and then share the nuggets of new knowledge that we generate.<\/p>\n

Seek-See-Solve-Share.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Historians\u00a0tell us that in the Middle Ages about 25 million people, one third of the\u00a0population of Europe, were wiped out by a series of Plagues! We now know that\u00a0the cause was probably a bacteria called Yersinia Pestis that was spread by fleas\u00a0when they bite their human hosts to get a meal of blood. The fleas … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Plague of Niggles”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,23,35,41,42,45],"tags":[50,59,125,184,186,270],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-healthcare","category-history","category-reflections","category-stories","category-how","category-what","tag-4n-chart","tag-behaviour","tag-health","tag-niggles","tag-nuggets","tag-system-behaviour"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}