The Common Uncommonly

It was a looooong Labor Day weekend.  And not in the fun way.

Our 20-month-old started wheezing Saturday night.  By Sunday morning, it was severe enough to go to the urgent care clinic.  By Sunday afternoon, the urgent care clinic threw in the towel and sent us to the ER.  By Sunday night, the ER decided we needed to stick around for a while, so we got admitted to the hospital.

And that’s when life became all about numbers.  Specifically, the number six.

After being admitted to the hospital Sunday night, we were told that our son would get breathing treatments every two hours.  Once he was able to maintain an acceptable blood oxygen level and respiratory rate, the treatments would shift to every four hours.  Once he was stable at four hours, the treatments would shift to every six hours.  Only after he was stable between on a six-hour regimen would we be able to take him home.

Six hours.  Now we had something concrete to focus on.  No gray areas, no “possibly” or “probably” or “maybe”.  Being stable at six hours  =  well enough to leave the hospital  =  success.  And so six became more than a guideline.  It became a fixation.

Over the next two days, I was reminded of a nasty truth about concrete goals: they can distract from your ultimate objective.  Nowhere is this truer than when you base success on a single number.

For example, is having a respiratory technician who shows up an hour late a good thing or a bad thing?  It depends on your perspective.

It’s a good thing when you look at the ultimate objective of getting a kid healthy.  Gradually stretching out the treatment times (especially if done intentionally, rather than due to over-scheduling) probably means you get a better sense of the duration of each dose’s effectiveness.  So you’re getting a better understanding of the severity of the condition and the body’s response to treatment.  Hard to argue with that.  Except…

It’s a bad thing when you are focused on the magic number six.  Because Mr. Respiratory Tech, your 11 am treatment still counts as a four hour treatment even though it’s been five hours since your last visit.  But now you’ve messed up our schedule and my son won’t get evaluated again until 3 pm rather than 2 pm.  So every time you are late (which seems to be fairly often), you put more and more time between us and the magic number six.

Of course the Respiratory Technician and I are on the same team.  We both want my kid healthy.  But if I’m completely focused on the number six, the RT becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution.  That’s screwed up, right?

And yet the same thing happens in business.  You lose opportunities to build relationships with people because you can’t assign an impressive ROI to a social media initiative.  Or you miss chances to understand your customers because your market research is focused on a “promoter score.”  Or you spend money on a traffic-boosting pay-per-click campaign that drives huge numbers of unqualified prospects to your website. 

Just something to think about the next time you’re looking at your key metrics, or your corporate dashboard, or your service line profit margins.  Are those numbers getting you where you need to go?  Or are they getting in the way?