Category: Knowing-doing gap

Diego at Metacool has an instructive and inspiring new post. He has a picture and a great discussion of a "To Do" list that was publicly displayed by the staff at the Denver Art Museum, which showed the things that they still needed to get done on a new addition.  I love this because it not only advertises to donors what things they need money for, it also creates public pressure on the staff to get things done.  As research on commitment shows, public proclamations are far harder to reverse than those that are made in private.  Perhaps this is the kind of thing that they suggest at the Department of Doing.

DaVita operates over 1200 kidney dialysis
centers in the United States. They employ about 30,000 people that serve
over 100,000 patients, and are committed to finding and acting on the best
possible evidence to guide both treatment and management decisions. DaVita was on the verge of bankruptcy in
1999, but under leadership of CEO Kent Thiry and COO Joe Mello, they have
become a great financial success and, more importantly, the quality of care at DaVita treatment centers keeps getting better and better.

Their
mantra is "no brag, just facts.”

My
colleague Jeff Pfeffer has written a fascinating teaching
case on DaVita and we discuss their commitment to evidence-based management
in substantial detail in Hard Facts.
We received an email from Joe Mello just the other day that demonstrates how
they are taking an evidence-based approach to the Otis Redding problem.

Here
is what Joe wrote us:

A few months ago I took over the
oversight for our revenue operations (Billing and collections). In the new
combined company we have about 900 FTEs in this area and we had just hired a
great senior executive to run it. It is really complicated. It was (and still
is) a mess.  Most of the time I think I’m pretty good at metrics, but with
this behemoth of a department I was really struggling. I decided to re-read
“The Knowing-Doing Gap”. It was great and really jazzed me up to tackle this
challenge. But the one line that really jumped out at me was “…because the
company that is not in control has far more measures because they’re not
changing the basic management systems that are in place…” Bam! Right between the
eyes…We went from 42 really important measures to 9 reeeaaallllyyy important
ones. And progress has begun!

I
am really impressed with this little story for a number of reasons. First, Joe
and his people are not only aware of the Otis
Redding problem, they are taking steps to tackle it head on. This takes
courage (as everyone has their favorite metric), it takes a business model that
is simple enough and well-understood enough to be represented by a small number
of metrics (or a commitment to developing one), and it is yet another
indication of how open DaVita is with its people – and everyone else – about
the steps that they use to practice evidence-based management.
At DaVita, there is a strong commitment to always acting on the best evidence
and to traveling on a continuing quest to find ever better evidence. If you read Joe’s statement, it drips with
the attitude
of wisdom: It reflects the confidence to act on the best knowledge
available, and the humility to keep looking for and repairing imperfections.