99% invisible
If you’re in healthcare (and I know a lot of people reading 5MSM are) have you ever wondered how much waste a single procedure creates?
This is Maria Koick on her experience: “In August 2019 I got diagnosed with breast cancer. They had to remove my entire left breast. After a successful recovery, I recently got a deep lap surgery where they gave me an entire new breast of my own bodily materials. I am so grateful for their craftsmanship and the chance to feel beautiful again, but during this process I discovered that 60% of the surgery materials used for this operation are disposable. For example, the stainless steel scissors, flown in from Japan, are used for one cut before they end up in the bin.”
Question: What inefficiencies are invisible because they are rarely questioned?
Resolved
Are you familiar with the feeling when you resolve a complex idea?
For me, it’s an almost physical sensation, a release, a sigh, an exhalation. While away, I read the new English translation of Vassily Grossman’s novel, The People Immortal, written in 1943, just when the German advance into Russia was turned around.
In only 200 pages, Grossman captures deeply human moments of the war experience, including, at one point, a beautiful description of how a commander, Mertsalov, resolved an impossibly complex set of battlefield issues and came up with a brilliant solution that annihilated a far superior German force.
"A mathematician or physicist is often overwhelmed in the first stages of his research by the complex and obstinate contradictions he has discovered in some apparently simple and ordinary phenomenon. He struggles to reconcile the various elements of this phenomenon, but they continue to contradict one another, to slip away from his grasp.
And then, as a reward for this arduous work of analysis, a clear and simple thought unexpectedly dawns on him, dispelling all confusion and complexity and yielding the only correct, astonishingly simple and irrefutable solution. This moment is what we call creative thinking. And what Mertsalov went through, as he wrestled with the problem before him, was no different from this. Never, perhaps, had he known such excitement and joy."
I agree with Grossman that this is true creativity: wrestling with alternatives until a single clear solution presents itself. And, in that moment, knowing it’s right.
Question: How can you deliberately exercise your - and your team’s - creative powers to resolve complex issues?
Reframe for relevance
One of my favourite inventor stories is that of telecommunications engineer Martin Cooper, who, in the early 1970s asked an immensely powerful reframing question: “What if phones were not linked to places, but to people?”
That line of questioning led to his employer, Motorola, inventing a device that I’m certain every one of you reading this owns, and takes utterly for granted: the mobile phone. Motorola had such faith in the idea that they put $100m into it from the time of the first successful demonstration in 1973, and the early 1990s, when they started making money from it.
I spent an afternoon recently with a client asking them to generate existential questions. Here are a few they came up with (retaining their anonymity):
“Given that we know what the solutions should be, why haven’t we yet solved our biggest problems?”
“How different would the world be if our clients followed our advice?”
“How could we put ourselves out of business?”
But why ask these ‘existential questions’? It’s more than a thought experiment — the questions are capable of reframing the way they think about their business. For instance, they generated three major insights by discussing these for no longer than an hour:
a) Speed matters
b) Make intelligent choices
c) Be more assertive in differentiating ourselves
These will turn into litmus test, or criteria, for assessing strategic choices down the track.
Question: What are 3 existential questions that would help reframe how your organisation does its work?
I’m in my last week of summer holidays, so the above are a ‘summer edition’ of past 5 Minute Strategic Mindset segments that have been popular with readers. I look forward to being back with new content from next week, so, if you’ve enjoyed reading, please click the ‘heart’ so it keeps the 5MSM pulse beating.
See you next Friday morning,
Andrew