When catastrophe is a minor blunder away, when you could amputate the wrong leg or remove the wrong kidney, for instance, it’s easy to get people to embrace High Reliability principles. Give a speech about HROs to a room full of O.R. docs and nurses, and you might see a lot of nodding heads. Give…
If you aspire to be a High Reliability Organization, your primary obstacle will be the adaptive limits of your staff. To be an HRO, your leaders must commit to zero harm. Your board must commit, your C-level leaders must commit, nurse leaders, physician leaders – leaders all the way down the line must commit to…
You should have grown wise before you grew old! This is a paraphrase of King Lear’s fool admonishing him for being naïve. Lear had come to the threshold of a grand transformation, and he assumed the skills and vision that got him there would serve him once he crossed it. Worse, he expected the old…