Lessons from a Scottish Caddie
Striving for Brilliance with your Productivity and Labor Management Efforts
(David Clement, Health Qlix CEO)
I recently had the good fortune to find myself in St. Andrews Scotland for business meetings and golf. The golf at the St. Andrews Links (the home of golf) and the entire coastline in the area is, of course, spectacular. It can also be very challenging. Although for full disclosure I must admit that I can find golf challenging in any part of the world.
After a few rounds of listening to the chatter and feedback of our caddies a pattern clearly emerged. Scots have a remarkable way of quickly describing the success level (or a more apt description, failure level) on any given shot. Failure looms large and is consistently experienced to greater or lesser extents. The shot description pattern that took shape broke down into the following:Â
Brilliant
Lovely
That’ll play
We can find that
Hit another, you’re on holiday
I suppose to compile a truly complete list of shot levels I would also need to include the most dreaded response of all – silence. Silence communicates that you’ve fallen below the verbal scale above and there is simply nothing more to be said.
While flying home I thought of the beauty and the fun of the trip. I also was thinking about the many post-shot comments I heard that spanned from ‘that’ll play’ to dead silence and it started to occur to me that golf and labor productivity management in healthcare share a lot in common. Neither is new, they have been around a long, long time. And, like few people master golf, few organizations master productivity and the related labor management and analytics efforts. Both are experienced by many but excelled at by few. The reason is simply that they are both hard! So many things have to be done right and in the proper sequence to achieve success and the desired results. To compound the challenge you also need to adapt to conditions that can, and do, rapidly change. And if that isn’t challenging enough, then you are required to consistently repeat those proper actions needed to sustain the positive results. Difficult indeed.
We’ve developed LaborLytics® to help the healthcare industry overcome these challenges and difficulties. Like hitting a golf ball, we understand all the many ways the majority of tools, approaches, and efforts fail. In many, even most, cases throughout the industry a Scottish caddie might define this failure as ‘we can find that’ or ‘hit another’ or worst of all, dead silence. Those are not the ringing sounds of success.
And the experience of our LaborLytics® customers? If our customers had a productivity caddie they would be hearing ‘lovely’ and ‘brilliant’ quite frequently. Even exclusively. Experience LaborLytics® and our unrivaled expertise and you just might even discover another level of success rarely spoken of – pure brilliance. In the meantime I can only dream of another visit to Scotland and making a perfect swing to hit that pure shot and revel in my caddie uttering that one simple word that describes it best. BRILLIANT!
Have a lovely and even brilliant day. Cheers!
David Clement with caddie Denis on the 18th green at
Kingsbarns Golf Links, St. Andrews, Scotland
Lessons from a Scottish Caddie
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