(From Black Box Thinking) In the 1980s Unilever had a problem.
The nozzle that made their washing powder at the Liverpool soap factory kept blocking and they needed to design a new nozzle. Initially they go together a group of what would now be known as intelligent designers, mathematicians and physicists who understood phased transition and the chemistry associated with the production of washing powder (essentially an industrial procedure). They spent months theoretically redesigning the new nozzle but when the nozzle was inserted it blocked the same as the old one. The process had cost a lot of money and taken a lot of time – lots of people scratched their heads (although I’m not sure anybody got struck off!)
Following that Unilever turned to a group of biologists to see if the could come up with a problem and they approached it from an entirely different way. This is the difference between top down and bottom up thinking. Instead of starting with a theoretical blueprint and trying to design the perfect nozzle based on science, they took the existing nozzle and made ten new ones, all with a slight modification from the original. They took the one out the ten which performed the best and made ten of those with slight modifications. By the 46th generation (460 odd nozzles) they had a brilliant nozzle. Just consider this for a moment…they never put all their eggs in the basket of a single theoretical nozzle, designed, built, tested it and failed. They failed and failed and failed and failed until they got it right, but the failed and measured and this is how we learn from things. They weren’t scared to get things wrong because they knew that the consequences of that was the opportunity to try again to get it right. Herein lies the problems with many of the stuff we come up against in life and in my profession of dentistry. For us at the moment you best not get it wrong because it certainly feels like you make not get the opportunity to put it right. That may be in a simple clinical procedure where the patient leaves upset to a single patient claim which can out a livelihood at risk. If something isn’t working it should be tested, measured, trialed and corrected. That applies to dentistry and clinical procedures but of course it also applies to administration and regulation. Much of what we have at the moment has been on intuitive thoughts from politicians and regulators, the increase in the number of complaints to the GDC has come from somewhere. It would be easy to say that patients are more dissatisfied or patients have become consumers but I think it would be fascinating to look into this and see why ‘the system is failing’. Cleverer people than me would be able to look at that and devise a system to try and figure out how much advertising, accessibility or legal impetus has led to an increase in complaints to the GDC.
Often the route to fixing something that is broken is counter intuitive, rarely the solution is to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Blog Post Number: 928
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