Let's Pretend

Some very smart and otherwise capable people try to run their operations as though they were surrounded by a Reality-Nullification Field.

Case in Point: I take a relative to a hospital every few weeks for a scheduled treatment. We often must idly wait, in silent frustration, for nearly two hours past the time the procedure was due to start.

Recently, following such a long wait and after summoning all the pleasantry I could muster, I politely asked the caring nurse, administering life-saving medication, about these repeated and annoying delays.

"Is it unusual for patients to have to wait for more than an hour-and-a-half past their scheduled time?," I inquired as casually as I could.

"It happens every day!" she exclaimed with exasperation.

"Hmmmm. Why is that?"

"The computerized scheduling system is set up to slot 70 patients a day. But on an average day, the system must accommodate 100 or more. Yesterday," the frustrated nurse revealed, "we handled 130, and we'll probably do that again today."

Result? By mid-morning, appointments are already running 90 minutes or more behind schedule. And the backlog only gets progressively worse while patients are forced to endure insult to injury.

"We operate 12 hours a day, and nearly every one of them is over-booked with angry patients having to wait a long time," the care giver laments. "Some people," she says with a sigh, "get really inappropriate with their frustration, but I understand why they do."

Clearly, that daily bottleneck of backlogged patients is neither an exception nor a surprise to anyone. So what's going on here?

The highly regarded hospital where this unfortunate and preventable drama unfolds daily is playing a cruel game called Let's Pretend.

Patients are forced to schedule an "appointment" with an organization that knows it most likely won't provide treatment at the appointed time while handling a patient volume somewhere between 40-percent and 90-percent greater than its "official" number.

No one, of course, is fooled by Let's Pretend. The patients know they are waiting. The staff knows appointments aren't honored. And the administration knows their scheduling software system is inadequate to its task.

Until someone changes the rules and resets the board, everyone is a loser in the self-defeating game of Let's Pretend.

If your organization has situations analogous to this hospital's, commit yourself to both acknowledging and addressing reality—especially if it's embarrassingly undesirable.

Draw strength for your action from these two truths.

1) Denying reality doesn't change it.

2) Systems seriously out of whack don't fix themselves.

There will never be a gizmo that will allow bad managers to generate a Reality-Nullification Field. It's up to you as a true leader to step up to real challenges, to right wrongs, and, most importantly, to prevent terrible messes from happening in the first place.

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Don Blohowiak, a management consultant and popular conference speaker, is the author of several business books. The executive director of the Lead Well® Institute in Princeton, NJ, he may be reached at http://www.LeadWell.com/.

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