Why have we humans inserted the desire to always go further into our culture? Increase? And have more?
We accept that “more is better” without proof. What if the best thing was to decrease? Subtract? Reduce?
We have a tendency to grow and add, this is not just in Brazilian culture, it is a global trend.
In organizations, the increase in complexity we are experiencing is exponential. We ask for more and more data and then we don't know what to do with it. We have a lot of data and little information to tell us the steps to follow. We get lost in the essence of a multi-faceted problem.
This phrase attributed to Mark Twain says:
“…I wrote you a long letter, as I didn’t have time to write a short one”.
How many times less is more! We accumulate tasks, specialties and businesses that simply add little to us. Currently the obligation to acquire more and more is on the rise. We buy a lot of things that we later resist throwing away.
It is interesting to know George Zipf's law of diminishing returns, which is very similar to Pareto's law and applies to many phenomena in different physical, natural and social disciplines. For example, the second richest person in a city would have half the income of the first and third only a third of the first, and so on.
Also in hospitals, often fall into the trap more is better. If we see the number of specialties, or services provided, we can analyze the profitability of each of them and see what each one is adding to the total.
If we follow the mathematical rule, we will see that if we already have 20 services and increase them by 50%, that is, we move to 30 services, we will only increase profitability by 11%. Of course, a general rule may not be fulfilled in particular, but it is always interesting to study how much each person contributes in total, with the real numbers in hand. This defines an implicit inefficiency in the increase in services, as we would have an increase in effort of 50% that only yields 11% more, that is, 78% less.
But we have other reasons in this case to appreciate less, such as the lack of specialization that prevents us from placing more automated and efficient systems on a smaller number of services. Also from a marketing point of view, we will remain in the middle ground, that is, in the absence of a singular image and productive efficiency. Loss of specialization is not seen as a problem in healthcare facilities.
The ultimate utopia of an efficient hospital system is to have processes organized as if it were a production line. This has existed for 30 years in the USA, in the case of simple surgeries.
If we analyze all these results more closely, perhaps we will have the desire to share our clients or patients with other institutions to improve the exchange, each one's specialization and productive efficiency.
He had already warned us Alvin Toffler, in the book The Third Wave, that the executive's problem in the future would be the increase in complexity. After 30 years, your thinking is more valid than ever. Developing a culture of simplicity spread throughout the organization, reviewing whether every increase is good and applying simple methods can lead us to focus on the best possible strategies.
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