Zero sum game

A zero sum game is a situation where adding more of something to one side means that there is less for the other. You can pay more money towards your retirement, or more money on vacations now, but you cannot do both.

Why am I talking about this? Because your perceptions of the world can intervene with your hospital's goals. You may believe, for instance that the more time your hospital spends becoming cat focused diminishes care for your canine patients.

I once worked with a veterinarian who believed that client service and improving medical standards were oppositional situations. The more we improved medicine, the poorer would be the client experience.

I realized this because every time I brought up the idea that the hospital could improve the medicine it provided the clients, she would mention that the clients liked the hospital now. She had somehow come to believe that there was an inverse relationship between client care and patient care - that you could not sustain high levels of both.

Sadly, after months of trying to improve the hospital's medicine through different means with mixed results, it was only towards the end of my tenure at the hospital that I realized what she meant. All along I had believed that it was one of her many non-sequitors and an effort to change the subject.

Had I been able to drill down to the root of where this belief system was rooted I may have been able to help her business forward and provided better results for her patients.

I mention this because we can all get too close sometimes to hear what the other person is saying. Sometimes listening is harder than it seems. I believed that I was hearing what the practice owner was saying, but I was not, and because I failed to hear it I largely failed to help the patients in her hospital receive the medicine that they deserved.

So the message here is, if you find that you are talking about improving cat care, say, and the other person remarks about how excellent your canine care is, maybe they're saying more about how they perceive the world than they are letting on.

There are many instances where people can believe that unrelated items are mutually exclusive and drilling down to where these biases come from can help your practice move forward. Take the time to examine the things that you believe cannot improve or change because to do so would cause a decline in the quality of another important benchmark. Is what you believe true? How can you test its veracity?

Change is hard, but believing that the change you are making will hurt another aspect of your business will make that change impossible. Whenever you consider a change, look at what fears it inspires, then drill deeper to the core. Find the fallacy and embrace the change, because improvement is never a zero sum game.