I Must Do Better Next Time

I was interviewed recently by LMK Clinical Research Consulting (podcast here). I was intrigued when in the interviewer’s introduction, he said that from reading my blog he knew that I “have a fundamentally positive outlook with how humans interact with systems”. I suppose that’s true but I’d not thought of it that way before. I do often quote W. Edwards Deming “Nobody comes to work to do bad job” and “A bad system will beat a good person every time”. The approach is really one of process thinking – it’s not that people don’t matter in processes, they are crucial. But processes should be designed to take account of the variation in how people work. They should be designed around the people using them. No point blaming the individual when things go wrong – time to learn and try to stop it going wrong next time. I wrote previously about the dangers of a culture of blame from the perspective of getting to root cause. Blame is corrosive. Most people don’t want to open up in an environment where people are looking for a scape-goat – so your chance of getting to root cause is much less.

Approaching blame in this way has an interesting effect on me. When things go wrong in everyday life, my starting point isn’t to blame myself (or someone else) but rather to think “why did that go wrong?” A simple everyday example…I was purchasing petrol (“gas” in American English) and there were two card readers at the till. The retailer asked me to put my card in – which I did. He immediately said “No – not that one!” So, I took it out and put it in the other one. “That’s pretty confusing having two of them,” I said. To which he replied, “no it’s not!” I can see how it’s not confusing to him because he is using the system every day but to me it was definitely confusing. I don’t think he was particularly interested in my logic on this, so I paid and said “Good-bye”. Of course, I don’t know why he had two card readers out – what was the root cause? But even without knowing the root cause, he certainly could have put a simple correction in place by telling me which card reader to put my card in to.

There’s no question, we can all learn from our mistakes and we should take responsibility for them. But perhaps by extending the idea of no blame to ourselves, we can focus on what we can do to improve rather than simply thinking “I must do better next time.”

Text: © 2018 Dorricott MPI Ltd. All rights reserved.