Improvement Insights Blog

Detective shows usually have two detectives: one who leaps to arrest an obvious suspect and one who continues investigate the evidence. Which one are you?

“If you’ve ever watched detective shows, there’s always one detective that wants to leap to a solution and arrest the wrong person and just get him off the off the books, right? Then the other detective [says], “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa… wait… wait a minute. We haven’t looked at all the evidence.”

“I see the same thing in Quality Improvement. Every time a team comes together, they all think they know what the right answer is. They’re all wrong. They’re all going off in different directions.

“Once we do the data analysis and get them aimed in the right direction, they all [say] “Oh, it’s not what I thought at all. It’s this thing over here.” Right?

“So don’t be that first detective that jumps to a solution, that comes up with expensive answers to problems that don’t exist. That’s not useful. Be the person who chases the data, drills down, figures out exactly what’s going on, gets the right people together to solve that problem, and then rinse and repeat. Just keep doing it forever, because there’s always something new to fix. (I hate that part, but that’s how it is.)

“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week: Don’t be that first detective; be detective number two. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”