Next step thinking
Each moment, each day, each operation, is performed as a process.
There are key components:
Time
Motion
Psychomotor performance
How much Time you have is defined by the limits of capacity:
Infrastructure available
Equipment available
Schedule available
Humans (skill mix) available
Contractual agreements in place (industrial agreements, WHS legislation, human rights obligations)
Motion is defined by how you do the things you do:
Process engineering
Flow architectures
Policies and procedures
Human factors
Ergonomics
Roadblocks
Workarounds
With the right dashboard, it is fairly easy to predict how each day will unfold.
According to CYNEFIN:
When things are easy, everything will progress according to ‘best practice’
When things are complicated, we start to prioritse, and regress to ‘good practice’
When things are complex, we start to drop what we think less important, and respond to evolving circumstances. We begin to jettison policy and therefore safety and quality.
When things are chaotic, we will do anything so long as we can believe we are being seen to be doing something that will achieve a result. We prioritise mere survival, both our own and the patient’s, as a goal of practice.
What we see is that the relationship between time, motion and psychomotor performance degrades as pressure is placed on the system of work.
Whilst at times things will always spiral out of control, that eventuality should be the exception rather than the rule.
The secret to success is in strategic planning.
The secret to strategic planning is mapping the limits of your resources.
Once you know the limits of your resources, it then becomes possible to engage in decision making algorithms, both defensive and aggressive, that allow you to optimise the functionality of your system within those limits of capacity.
Now the real work starts.
You already have built a mental model of infrastructure capacity.
You now get to build robustness and flow into your systems processes.
You now get to build capacity and resilience in your human resources.
Quieter days become opportunities, not to slacken off, but to build muscle memory into the system.
Busy days become opportunities to practice the system under mild pressure, and learn where improvements can be made or where things are going well.
‘Getting smashed’ days allow you to examine the system under stress, and learn what decisions made where impacted on safe quality performance.
In the end, the goal is stress inoculation, which is a guiding principle for targeted education and building capacity in both individuals and the system of work.
