Five years ago I explored the talent myth, starting with Matthew Syed’s book ‘Bounce’ and then recently explored his second book ‘Black Box Thinking’ (a blog coming about that later)
In this new book Syed explores the concept of failure as a means or a ladder to success and how you respond to failure being essential to your route through life.
For many years it has been clear to me that one of the biggest problems we have in our profession is the shit that is talked amongst clinicians about the things that they do and the lack of things that go wrong. This is much more eloquently described by Syed than it is by me and he calls it ‘failure denial’.
In this book he explores to concept of cognitive dissonance and the ability for almost any individual to create a reality that they strongly believe despite the overwhelming facts to the opposite. His book deconstructs healthcare from the very start in quite a shocking way and at times makes you feel ashamed to be part of a system that is so clearly closed. He also though attacks the criminal justice system for its lack of reflection and its lack of introspection, therefore providing no ability to move forward or improve and contrasts this with the way the aviation industry deals with failure as a means for improvement.
Ever since I was involved in leadership in the practice it has been essential that we have provided not only audits but numbers in the practice that are meaningful to allow us to improve and change, no more so than in my own practice where we look very carefully at the amount of early failures in implant dentistry as an indicator for how things are doing (this year has actually been the worst I’ve ever had)
The next step on from the platform that we have built is to open up the practice to an absolutely no blame culture where everybody can report mishaps or significant events that go wrong that can be discussed openly and honestly in a culture that seeks improvement at every possible level.
This is not just clinical factors within the practice, this is untidy reception, problems in the decontamination room, letters not sent to patients on time, emails not responded to, phones not answered, coffee not made when patients come in. It’s very single aspect of what we do at work as part of our exceptional care philosophy and as we move into the next five years of development of our organisation the removal of failure denial will be one of the biggest things we implement.
It’s not enough to have a system where people can report things that go wrong if the organisation doesn’t have an attitude that embraces it.
The funny thing is the person that makes the most mistakes in the practice is me so none of us going forwards should be scared to report things that have gone wrong to allow us to discuss it to make us better.
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