If it Ain't Broke...

A few years ago, I worked as a Medical Technologist. This is a title given to people who work in medical laboratories who have bachelor's degrees and maintain an accreditation from any of two or three nationally recognized organizations. I'm relatively mechanically inclined and can be pretty handy with a screwdriver and duct tape, so I was often put in charge of maintenance on the machines and with diagnostics on those instruments that were malfunctioning.

I got sent to several training schools and inservices for different machines. One of the most common things that they taught in any of these was that if you replaced a part in the out of order instrument and that part didn't solve the problem, put the old part back in before trying anything different. The strategy here is a good one. You must make sure that you're not introducing a new problem into the system, and the odds that you've got two simultaneous problems are relatively low. I kept this advice with me and followed it whenever performing diagnostics on an instrument. It served me well.

Fast forward a while to my life in corporate America. It has been my experience that large corporations put a lot of time, effort, and money into refining existing processes. Innovation is a very good thing, when you approach it correctly. But I've found that often these improvement projects are taken on by different teams and they're not necessarily coordinated in any way. If one team finds a potential problem area in a specific process, they'll come up with a solution which may not benefit the system as a whole. The lack of coordinated efforts mean that two or more of these teams may work on different processes and completely cancel out any benefit they may have enjoyed from their solutions.

It may be oversimplification, but the credo of the laboratory instrument diagnostician may serve large corporations as well. It might help them to try one thing at a time before moving on to the next step.

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I've noticed that a goodly percentage of my readers (like, 2 out of the 4 total) have had some problems posting comments in the last week or two. I've twiddled a couple of knobs in my profile settings that may help. Or not. We'll see.


"Any of you out there with telekinetic powers? Raise my hand."