7/12/98 Antony Aitken wrote:
>In an environment where financial numbers are the natural way of life:-
>
>1. How do you communicate the concepts and context of a Balanced Scorecard
>to the whole organisation, so that all the people see it as relevant to
>them?
I too have struggled with this issues. I work in healthcare and have been
fascinated with the work of Eugene Nelson at Dartmouth. His work centers
around a Value Compass and looks at healthcare from a financial, clinical,
patient satisfaction, and clinical outcomes perspectives. Dr. Nelson's
premise is that the quality of healthcare is more than the "hard"
financial numbers. The number of days it takes to get back to work is a
very important "financial" measure for patients and so should be for us as
well. But ... healthcare managers look at costs (days in the hospital,
resources consumed). Moving from those measures to other "softer"
measures is equally hard.
In the people I find making the transition, I find one unique quality:
somehow they have thought about "being" a healthcare provider who walks in
the patient's shoes first and foremost. They change their thinking, their
personal mental model. They become, first a patient advocate, then an
employee of a healthcare organization. I find those who do not or cannot
make the move get right to the measuring (the doing) and never examine
their mental models (the way they "be"). [sorry for the bad English]
For this reason I have been looking for techniques to help people review
their mentals models in simple ways. What is the difference between
caring for a patient and healing the patient? What is a cost in
healthcare? These questions for us in healthcare are very difficult
questions and they take time and energy to address. I do believe the
energy is well spent and makes measurement a whole lot easier in the end.
Perhaps it is glib to say substitute patient for customer and the idea
works for the business world. I do thank you for the question, for me it
is an important one because we have the tools to measure what we "do", I
find we are struggling with what we "are". I was told the major problem
with the Titanic was that shipbuidling tools had matured to allow them to
build a ship that big but the metals knowledge was not equally mature to
allow big pieces of steel of sufficient quality and strength to be
manufactured. This uneven maturity in disciplines caused the hole to be
ripped in her hull. I find this analog the same in measurement; our
tools (our doing) has matured, but our mental models (our being) has a way
to go yet.
Jim Vaillancourt
tinkrjim@chi.tds.net
--Jim Vaillancourt <tinkrjim@chi.tds.net>
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