Why isn't everyone interested? by Nancy Chek

Living my life this week inside the question of innovation—what does it take? What environment allows for it? What ways of being argue for it? What is it correlated with? My last question is: Why isn’t everyone interested in it?

There’s a medical group in which a dozen or so of the 300 doctors have committed to innovation that produces better and cheaper patient outcomes. All I can wonder is:  Those 288 not committed--What is life like for them that they do what they do without caring about doing it better?  It comes down to I find that hard to believe.

That doesn’t mean it’s not so. I think of an engineer at a software company who’s been doing his job for 25 years and does it to the best of his ability as a matter of pride and a paycheck. He clearly states that he has no desire to invent anything new or even learn new skills. He’s satisfied. The 288 may be satisfied in the same way. I say it’s not my way, but hold on a minute, cowgirl. There are whole realms in which I lack any interest whatsoever in innovation. Refrigerators and lawnmowers come to mind. Perhaps not everyone is always looking for ways things can be improved.

That doesn’t mean customer feedback can’t be useful, if companies have a mind to take it into account. The day after getting a sun-damaged place on my face biopsied, I received a query from the dermatologist at Kaiser asking if everything was okay and if I had any suggestions. I emailed back saying as a matter of fact I did have a suggestion: I recommended that he ask biopsy patients (if they came in alone) to sit a few minutes in the waiting room afterwards to settle down before going out on shaky legs and (as I did) planting themselves face down in the snow.

Most doctors have never had the procedures they perform on others performed on themselves, so they have no idea what occurs for patients. I had never had a biopsy either, so I didn’t know shaky was something I should watch out for. If there had been no snow, I would have needed to turn around and go right back into Kaiser to get my hand and head bandaged (costing time, money and aggravation).

Most surgeons have never had surgery. I took the opportunity to tell one particularly personable surgeon what it was like (after a previous surgery) to be wide awake and completely unable to move or open my eyes and hear “This one’s not going to make it.” He went white. I told him I knew they weren’t talking about me, but at the same time I wondered if the poor guy they were talking about was as awake and immobile as I was. I suggested they use a code word instead. “Rutabaga” maybe. Or French. Anything.

It’s all well and good to pay attention to what doesn’t work, and I notice that is where the mind goes. At the same time, I wonder how much more might be gained by paying attention to what works unaccountably. My favorite science quote is Isaac Asimov’s: “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka” but “That’s funny . . . .”

My second favorite is Erwin Schrödinger‘s: “The task is . . . not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.”

I am not finished contemplating innovation. Even after coming up with a better way to do things, that’s only part of the job. The hardest part is having other people—who have been doing things the “old way” for years—be interested in doing them better.