As a mum managing a busy family of six and two small businesses, you could say I thrive in complexity.
But something’s gotta give, and that’s when I discovered my domestic saviour:
my humble robot vacuum.
Secretly, I want to be more like it. Openly, it has inspired my approach to working with health and social care organisations, and what Unplex is all about.
So, what exactly does this gadget have to do with effective health and social care service delivery and organisation? Surprisingly, more than meets the eye – and nothing to do with cleaning.
This hard-working machine can tell us a lot about the importance of clarity, consistency, and adaptability for starters.
In this post I share the lessons I’ve learned from my robot vacuum (don’t worry, they don’t suck 🤓) and how I’ve shaped these into five important steps that inform every project we tackle at Unplex.
Incidentally, these five important steps should inform any service redesign project you consider too.
Lessons in effective health and social care management from my robot vacuum
When my husband and I first set up our robot vacuum, we’d watch it for hours on end, marvelling at its systematic pursuit of efficiency.
Its sleek figure gliding effortlessly across the floors, navigating obstacles with ease, and removing one layer of stress from our ever-expanding household to-do list.
I realised that, much like this machine, successful health and social care service design and delivery is about firstly defining a clear purpose and then diligently getting on with the work.
Here’s why my robot vacuum inspires my work:
It knows that:
- its core purpose is to do the most efficient job of vacuuming my house
- carefully mapping out the house is the first step it has to take to achieve its core purpose
- this first step will take multiple tries
- this first step will be messy and convoluted
- when it persists and trials multiple pathways, it will find the most efficient route to achieve its core purpose.
Sure, it takes longer than a human to vacuum the house but it does a much more thorough and consistent job.
Sure, it gets stuck every now and then, but, with some human help it recovers, reorients to its map and resumes the job.
Steady. Consistent. Always on point. Slightly boring!
How I turned these learnings into my five-step strategy process that informs every project
At the end of the day, we are not robots. We are human – and because of that, the process of organising and delivering care is way more fun (or should be 🤪). As Antonio Damasio says (thanks, Brene Brown),
“We are not necessarily thinking machines, rather, we are feeling machines that think”.
My trusty cleaning machine has helped me do a lot of thinking.
From it I’ve borrowed the following important steps for designing a new and improved service delivery model in health and social care.
1. Be clear about your core purpose.
This is usually your vision or mission. What is it that you and your team, service, or organisation are deeply passionate about achieving? Ideally what would that look like?
2. Work hard to develop piercing insight into what is essential to this core purpose and what is not.
Identify all the things that either help or hinder you from working towards this ideal state. What are the things you can and cannot change? What do you believe are the biggest levers for achieving your ideal state? What is simply just noise? Talk to the individuals you serve; talk to your teams. They know the answers here!
3. Acknowledge and continually work through the complexity in your organisation to discern underlying patterns in it that are preventing you from achieving your core purpose.
As organisational psychology guru Gareth Morgan surmises, “… organisations are living organisms with brains and cultures. They are the sum of the all the humans that they house, and all the complexity that humans bring.” So, identifying and acknowledging the complexity in your team, service and organisation is essential.
4. Use this process to create strategic maps, that enable you to achieve your core purpose. Maps that you can return to and re-boot when you get stuck or lost.
In management speak, this step is creating your ‘strategic plan’. It sounds like this is the end of the line – but a great plan is alive and agile, continually being tweaked and adapted by the people who need to deliver it.
You have a great opportunity to work with your teams and the individuals you serve to identify ways you can transform all the intel from steps two and three into a range of activities that will help you achieve your purpose. Once these are clear, get your teams to work out the nitty gritty of how you can collectively execute these activities and to identify how you will know if you have made any progress towards your purpose.
5. Acknowledge that this takes time, multiple tries, a few failures, and significant effort and battery life but is worth it in the end.
This seems like a throwaway line, but in fact this step is the hardest! No one likes a plan that doesn’t work… so, there is method in creating the right contexts so you can quickly identify if the plan isn’t working and change course. Executing the above four steps is hard work. It takes consistency, accountability, courage, and patience!
I try very hard to use and develop these steps in my own business and with my clients.
Has anyone else borrowed from their AI?!
Need some help with strategy planning?
After 20 years in health and social care, I founded Unplex to gently help health and social care organisations see their problems differently.
Using evidence and information collected from everyone that matters, we gracefully walk through all the ways that you can set up systems and strategies to help address your problems.
If you’d like help unravelling your complex problems, send us an email at hello@unplex.com.au, or join our small community by subscribing to our newsletter at Connect – UNPLEX – I can’t wait to hear from you.