Welcome back to the Editorial for a brand new year! I hope that you have had a good and restful holiday and are now looking forward to returning to the drudgery that makes up a typical 9 to 5 day. I, personally, find myself yearning for it as we were fortunate enough to have a healthy baby boy arrive on the 31st of December and his 9 to 5 day appears to be between 2:00am and 4:00am. His unreasonable screaming also appears to be much more effective than my reasoned and erudite communication approach and I am now questioning my abilities on a daily basis.

Newborns always provide food for thought and I decided that a great way to start the New Year would be to share some of those incoherent ramblings that have found their way in to my head – coincidentally, mostly between 2:00am and 4:00am each morning. For those of you with children you will understand and for those of you without children… we hate you all!

Babies, Hospitals and Boards of Directors

My wife gave birth at Frances Perry Hospital in Melbourne – a private hospital that falls under the domain of the mighty Ramsay Health Care. Ramsay Health Care is, according to them, “the largest and most respected private hospital operator in the country with a high quality portfolio of hospitals and an excellent record in hospital management and patient care – features that combine to attract Australia’s leading practitioners.” Nice to know that private healthcare is in such good hands!

Our visit was the second time that Clare had given birth at the hospital and the first time was a very unpleasant experience that resulted in a written complaint to the Director of Clinical Services, a written apology back to us, the disciplining of an entire ward and the firing of at least one member of the nursing staff. Unfortunately, Frances Perry was the hospital that our Obstetrician worked out of so Frances Perry it had to be.

As you can imagine, our second visit back to the hospital was not without a degree of trepidation. However, I am pleased to report that our second experience was nowhere near as bad as our first experience (which essentially boiled down to a failure in the hospitals duty of care). Sadly, nor was our second visit back a great experience. It was lots of little things… staff who clearly hadn’t read the chart, staff who lost the chart, a room change to an inferior room halfway through the stay because it suited admin and not the patient, medication that didn’t arrive when it was supposed to, parking charges that could amount to upwards of $50 per day… Like I said, lots of little things and probably nothing that ever killed anybody. It no doubt happens to lots of people but the little failures are not what got me thinking.

On the board of Ramsay Health Care is an acquaintance of mine by the name of Rod McGeoch AM, LLB, MAICD. Rod is one of Australia’s foremost business people and is probably best known as the CEO of Sydney’s successful 2000 Olympics bid. He has also served or is currently serving on the boards of such companies as Telecom NZ, Sky City and Gullivers Travel Group. Without a doubt he is a very astute and highly respected businessman and one who is very passionate about Ramsay Health and the quality of care that they provide. That is what got me thinking.

How can my personal experience of one of Rod’s flagship hospitals be so completely different to what Rod and his board both espouse and completely believe? Rod champions the business standards and expectations of Ramsay Health Care quite regularly on the speaking circuit and I know him well enough to know that he would not speak so highly of an organization unless he was utterly convinced of the validity of his position. Is my experience (twice in a row) completely out of the ordinary or are Rod and his board completely misinformed?

I once had a similar experience with an ANZ board member who was proudly telling me of the brilliant service culture that they had developed and yet I could walk in to just about any ANZ branch and see no evidence of this culture at all.

Are boards being deliberately mislead by their senior managers as to the true situation on the ground or are the senior managers themselves in turn also completely out of touch with reality? There seems to be an ever-widening gulf between the rhetoric of boards and the operational realities of the businesses they govern and that, in turn, would appear to point to a massive miscommunication internally that is not only not being fixed but apparently going unrecognized.

Incidentally, from the snippets of conversation heard at the nursing station, the staff of Frances Perry House doesn’t appear to believe their board either. Just food for thought.

English to Alien Translation

As I mentioned earlier we are currently living with a space alien who comes from a race of people who can’t understand abstractions. They can only understand things that they can observe directly and repeatedly. I am not referring to the space alien that arrived on the 31st of December 2009 but rather to an earlier arrival (posing as the space alien’s older brother) that has been with us for 18 months. Liam (not his alien name but the cute one we have given him) is desperately trying to learn concepts like “brother” and “gentle” as he comes to grips with the newest arrival, Samuel (also not his alien name).

Making the abstract concrete is often a very difficult exercise but a very worthwhile one. Too often we rely on abstract concepts in our business communication and it has the effect of diminishing its effectiveness. We “think” people inherently understand what we are talking about and we therefore don’t need to provide examples. Unfortunately, examples are exactly what people require in order to fully understand abstract concepts. It is virtually possible to understand ‘democracy’, for example, unless you can see it in action. It is difficult to comprehend ‘friendship’ unless you can experience its conduct. All of us learn what a parent is by watching our own and others – not by reading the definition in a dictionary.

It is why simulation is so powerful and storytelling so memorable and why all of us need to make a conscious effort to turn the abstract in to living breathing concrete examples that people can relate to. I could talk until I was blue in the face about ‘gentle’ and Liam would never understand. Instead I say the word ‘gentle’ and I show him what it looks and feels like – both for him and others. Slowly but surely he is grasping it’s meaning. Any day now I will be fulfilling his request to take him to our leader!