Fast discovery

In any situation or workplace where conditions are awkward – information is missing, materials are misplaced, supporting services are absent – people will have to spend time in working around issues. In Steven Spear’s words, there’s a lack of gracefulness.

Steven Spear is Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and at the Engineering Systems Division, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a faculty affiliate at Harvard Medical School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

His work focuses on helping complex organisations to use systemic learning to build resilience and agility in their work. Steven draws on experience from a range of sectors and pulls together common threads.

In his thought paper, Fast discovery, Steven explores the gaps between the ‘theoretical limit’ (ie what could be achieved) and what organisations actually achieve with the innate potential of the people they employ and the technology they use. He argues that much time is used unproductively due to ‘awkwardness’ and examines how this can be addressed. He suggests a threefold approach to turn awkwardness into gracefulness. First, to recognise that a problem is occurring, so something is not seen as ‘normal’ because it has happened a lot. Second, if you have a problem ‘swarm’ it right away, so those affected by the problem, and those in functions supporting them, all work together both to contain the issue and to begin solving it. Third is to recognise that the team who saw the problem and started working on the solution are now the experts on that situation.

Steven spoke at our recent annual conference, Permanent beta: Fast-forward to a learning health care system, in a talk entitled The high velocity edge. You can watch a video of the session on our site.