HIDDEN BUSINESS ISSUES HOW TO

Developing these skills would have required them to acknowledge their weakness in this area and take time away from delivering on their current commitments. However, the physicians in charge did not have strong planning skills. One of the most common payoffs is that the current system allows people to avoid “paying the price” of changing their behavior.įor example, for the senior managers of the medical informatics group, many of whom are doctors themselves, making more reliable commitments would require them to plan their work more carefully. People experience payoffs from the system as it is currently designed.įor example, the senior managers of the medical informatics group came to recognize that the existing system acknowledged them for their ambitious vision and commitment, motivated them to work hard in service of this vision, and averted the need to challenge their clients’ own unrealistic expectations.Ģ. However, on closer observation the premise leads to some important insights:ġ. For example, why would people create a system that produces low-quality products delivered late at the expense of their own personal health and well-being? At first glance, when we look at how dysfunctional our existing systems can be, this premise seems absurd. One of the premises of systems thinking is that systems are perfectly designed to achieve the results they are producing. Look for both/and solutions, i.e., ways to achieve the benefits of both the status quo and the desired state.

What would motivate them to make the changes that would best enable them to accomplish what they want?.

Why do1people persist in making seemingly superficial changes?.

We can’t get traction on making the most important changes.

We make changes that should work but don’t seem to get at the core issues.

The costs of conducting business as usual are high and growing.

We have noble aspirations for what we want to achieve.

This situation is all too common in organizational life:

HIDDEN BUSINESS ISSUES HOW TO

Senior staff talked about the need for change and actually learned new skills such as how to make more reliable commitments, but they had an uncomfortable feeling that they were not addressing the really critical issues. Simply put, people were overcommitted and under-delivering.

Despite strong corporate support, the unit faced multiple problems, including trying to convince a loosely knit confederation of hospitals to implement its ideas, making commitments to these hospitals and then failing to deliver high-quality systems on time, and burning out its staff in the process. For the medical informatics unit of a major health services organization, the vision was clear and compelling: assure that the most advanced current knowledge about medical informatics be incorporated into the company’s clinical information systems.

Hidden business issues