Butterflies

 

In industry after industry, far too often when trying to change behaviour, businesses will often look to what others within their industry are doing and copy the playbook. They then wonder why their problems aren’t going away.

To those who have utilised lateral category analysis however (where you look to companies outside of your category to see if they’ve already cracked your problem or a similar one), some of the improvements have been astounding…

• A UK Children’s Hospital back in the 90s wanted to reduce its error rate. Instead of speaking with internal colleagues or those from other hospitals about the best plan of attack, the team looked laterally and consulted with Formula 1 pit crew teams. By reviewing video of the hospital’s procedures as well as showing videos of their own manoeuvres, suggestions were able to be made that stemmed from their world. One such change was for the hospital to deploy a pit crew “lollipop man” (this is the person that holds a long sign that waves a driver through after ensuring the rest of the team has done their jobs) in order to give one person (the anaesthetist) overall responsibility for coordinating the team before handover. After changing its protocol, the hospital’s error rate dropped from 30% to 10%!

• In 1989 Bengal tigers were proving depressingly successful at killing Indian villagers. It wasn’t until a student at Calcutta’s Science Club remembered that tigers only attacked when they believed they weren’t being watched. Thinking laterally, the student remembered that the patterns often found on beetles, butterflies and caterpillars resemble oversized eyes ostensibly in order to trick predators into thinking they’re being watched. This insight resulted in the design of a cheap rubber human face mask worn on the back of the villagers’ heads. The result – over the next three years, anyone killed by tigers during that time had either refused to wear the mask or had taken it off whilst working.