Improvement Insights Blog

Some people think they have to climb Mount Everest or do a fire walk to overcome their fears. Maybe it’s just as easy to do the thing you are afraid to do in your normal life. Maybe it’s time to climb Mount Quality. Maybe it’s time to create a hassle-free experience for your company’s customers.

  “My wife’s been watching these shows about people climbing Mount Everest. You see people, they’re waiting for the final the final [ascent] and there’s a huge queue of people waiting to go up to the top of Mount Everest… (It’s like [maybe] they should put in an express lane or something!) It [seems] like everybody’s doing it. There’s also people who want to go run marathons, or want to go out to Hawaii and compete in the Ironman competition, or people who want to walk across a bed of fire coals, right?

“What is this? Well, we’re trying to achieve something: climb that highest mountain, whatever it is.

“Well, what I’d like to suggest to you is that you don’t have to do that to decide to do the thing you’re really avoiding, which is to go out and create some incredible thing in the world, right? In my particular case, I’m trying to create a hassle-free America. (Especially hassle-free health care with zero harm.) That’s one of my outcomes.

“Now, do I think I can get it all done all by my lonesome? No! But maybe if I have that as an outcome I can pull other people into my lunacy and start to make the movement that hasn’t quite happened yet, because Healthcare’s been doing Process Improvement coming and going on all of this stuff for two decades but the numbers have not changed.

“Why not set a Big Hairy Audacious Goal to move the world, you know? There’s a lot of CEOs out there that are trying to come up with the next “disruptive innovation.” Well, maybe the real disruptive innovation is to deliver what you do now flawlessly, affordably, with minimal hassle so that customers can get what they want right now. I always say people want it Free, Perfect and Now, and if you can deliver two of those you’re in pretty good shape.

“This is a different way of thinking: maybe we don’t have to go run a marathon, maybe we don’t have to walk across fire… we don’t have to do that. We don’t have to do the fire walk. Maybe we should just go out and tackle the one thing that we’re scared of doing. One of the things you can do is set a goal so big that if it came to fruition it would blow your mind. But once you start that, things start coming to you as a way to approach it – to get to that outcome – and it’s just because suddenly the opportunities become visible to you where they were not before.

“So there’s my Improvement Insight for this week: Like I said, let’s create a hassle-free America; let’s create a hassle-free healthcare system. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”