Listen / Read
It’s Rev Dr Dickinballs again. If you’ve only just tuned in, that’s because I think he sounds like a cross between David Dickinson and Johnny Ball. If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed that I find as tenuous a way as possible to refer to Thought for the Day readers in the expletive. Usually I don’t even put that much thought into it.
As usual, the first thing I have to ask myself after this reading is ‘what point was he actually trying to make…?’ It sounded like it was going to be a little rant about technology. And then it was accountability. And then clarity. I think that all we can really say, and let’s be clear about this, is that Rev Dr Dickinballs’ reading today was fraught with systematic failures at every level.
Isn’t it possible that one of the failures of certain organisational systems is that they force people to make the wrong decisions decisively? Like the hospital mentioned recently that had doctors being forced to prioritise minor injuries to make sure patients were seen within a certain amount of time. They were making decisive yes/no calls, but they were the wrong yes/no calls. That’s a systematic failure, but there’s no reluctance to decide. In that case, certain evidence or data, namely the length of time the patient was waiting, was prioritised while other data, such as the severity of the patient’s condition, was ignored. How many lives might have been saved by the inconsequential business of assessing patients according to need?
Perhaps ‘don’t oversimplify context-specific matters’ should be written over Rev Dr Dickinballs’ office door? Oh wait, that’s right, he doesn’t have one. He’s just keeping himself inconsequentially busy now he’s retired. The devil makes work for idle hands.