SSI PREVENTION

I promised to give a shout out about the National Human Factors in Patient Safety conference hosted by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland @RCSI_Irl this coming Friday. I'm giving a talk titled “Rocking the boat while staying in it: How to make change happen and not get wet”. RCSI are fantastic champions of improvement & their events are excellent. You can attend this face to face in Dublin or virtually: bit.ly/3RKHCf6 #HumanFactorsAcademy

Loneliness at work has become an epidemic, leading to workplace stress, people being absent & leaving their jobs. New research has highlighted multiple myths that lead to many leaders making the workplace loneliness situation worse. Myths: 1) Loneliness can be solved by coming back to the office 2) Teams will solve loneliness 3) Lonely people are needier socially than others at work 4) Loneliness is a personal problem, not an organisational problem. Practical actions that leaders can take to reduce work loneliness include measuring loneliness, designing slack in workflows, creating a culture of connection, building socialising into the rhythm of work & maximising each work mode (remote or f2f) for connection. hbr.org/2024/11/were-still-l…. Via @HarvardBiz

Do we need more specialist or more generalist skills for the future? Some futurists predict that, in the age of AI, choosing to be a generalist will be a risky career move. Someone with broad, basic competence in multiple domains is likely to be overtaken by an AI language model. However, there is a growing view that generalists will own the future. A generalist has something that language models don’t have: the capacity to learn quickly & see/solve novel problems in new domains. The person who thrives in the future might not be the expert who knows the exact answer to a question (specialist). Rather, it might be the one who knows which questions to ask in the first place (generalist). every.to/chain-of-thought/wh…. By @danshipper via @FerraroRoberto.

Senior leadership teams are force multipliers: effectiveness radiates from the top team throughout an organisation. Yet in a study by @CCLdotORG, two-thirds of the senior executives felt their top team was ineffective & only 20% felt that their team was high performing. Research by @BainandCompany identified five behaviour traits that the most effective top teams have in common. These traits are collective - they characterise the behaviours of the team as a whole, not those of its individual members: 1) Direction: the team collectively sets purpose, vision & strategy 2) Discipline: everyone understands the strategies, objectives & deliverables of their peers so they can work together interdependently 3) Drive: the team prepares carefully, debates constructively & is industrious & resilient over the long term 4) Dynamism: they treat change as constant & positive 5) Collaboration: the team creates the psychological safety needed to give and take feedback, listen actively, brainstorm, solve problems & hold themselves accountable: hbr.org/2024/09/teamwork-at-…. Via @HarvardBiz

Many of the tools & methods we use for innovation are designed for "developmental" innovation; incremental improvement to existing products & services. The gap between where we are now & where we need to be is so big that we need much more "radical" innovation. This kind of innovation is qualitative & not quantitative in nature — it is not about size of the change but the kind of change. We cannot deliver radical innovation using developmental innovation approaches. We need different practices & tools for different forms of change & innovation. That is one of the biggest challenges for changemakers of our era. See: medium.com/the-emergent-futu…. By Jason Frasca of @ACFuturesLab

"Mattering" is the belief that we’re significant to the world around us. When people feel they matter, they feel seen, important & needed through how others treat them. Scholars have deemed mattering to be a core instinct that drives all human behaviour. That’s why, when someone doesn’t believe they matter at work they: - won’t share their voice if they don’t believe their voice is significant - won’t use their strengths if they don’t believe they have strengths - won’t contribute if they don’t believe they have something to contribute - won’t care as much as if they feel cared for Actions that leaders/ teams can take: see some excellent articles by @ZachMercurio - "How to Create Mattering at Work": zachmercurio.medium.com/how-… and "The Cost of Not Mattering at Work": zachmercurio.medium.com/the-….