Changing the world at your day job
Many of us have a dream to leave the world a better place than we found it. However, the demands of the day job/life responsibilities/social situations mean that our altruistic ambitions are relegated to the pile of things we hope to do “someday” when we can quit our jobs, feel less like a cog in the machine and go cure world hunger (or some equivalently noble cause).
The problem with big and ambitious goals is that they tend to be vague, are very daunting and are easily relegated to get done “someday” when your life will be optimally positioned to tackle the problem. Of course, for most, that day never comes.
In this article, I’ll share an example from my life as an anaesthetic doctor on how I chose a meaningful goal that I hope will eventually have a disproportionate impact on the world. My approach focused on identifying a smaller, specific and scalable change that I could get started on as soon as possible.
Overall problem
Being a complex system, healthcare is full of inefficiency. As an anaesthetist , I frequently work in the operating theatre where a multitude of teams come together to perform complex surgeries to care for patients. Everyone from the surgeons, nurses, transport staff and cleaners play their part in a complex dance to make sure the sick are well looked after. Like any complex process, any slow down compounds and leads to delays, leading to less surgeries being done on any given day, blowing out wait lists for patients having procedures.
Starting small
My own interest in healthcare is improving efficiency. Genuinely get a sense of satisfaction if I manage to reduce delays and allow as much operating time as possible. As a starting point, my goal became to try increasing operating time per day.
Getting specific
While the goal initially seemed clear, I quickly realised that it wasn’t specific enough. I was never going to record all the minutes of allowable operating time so I was never going to know if something worked or not. However, one of the nurses pointed out that my lists often were earmaked for getting a small extra case done if we finished earlier.
This changed my goal to try and do one extra case per day.
Doing one case in a day might not seem like much given that any institution can be doing a dozen to hundred cases given the nature of the surgeries and the number of theatres available, but I think it was still a worthy goal. My own statistics showed that I did approximately 5 cases on any given day that I worked (many were half days and many had long complex operations that lowered the average). If I could do 1 extra case, it would mean a 20% increase in cases done. Realistically I knew this would only likely happen once or twice a week.
Starting to scale
It was a depressing realisation that a simple goal of trying to do 1 extra case would happen so infrequently. However, given that on average a surgical list had something like 3–5 cases, it meant that every month, I’d be eliminating a half day of work if I was successful.
Better than nothing, but this would be much better if I could scale this goal.
At this point, I realised the biggest impact I could do is actually try and train the junior doctors around me to have a similar ethos. I work at a teaching hospital and in addition to teaching them the core skills, I could also point out the ways they can efficiently establish workflows and also realise that doing one extra case a week can mean a free surgical list every month.
ASAP and now…
Now, I have never thought I was a good teacher nor did I particularly enjoy the teaching process. However, realising that if I manage to pass on the ethos of trying to do an extra case to just one of my trainees that would mean 10 extra lists per trainee per year, I found that I was actually excited to teach and even more so when I saw them picking up the little nuances to get more done in a day.
Now, if I indulged my own hubris, I could argue that they might go on to pass on the principles to their trainees, creating a virtuous compounding cycle that would have a disproportionate impact going forward. Even without achieving that, just knowing that this goal of mine has the possibility of impact many in a positive way has made my day job much more enjoyable and given me a new starting point to look for more world changing problems. Maybe I could focus on being a more inspirational teacher so that more trainees take up the mantle? Maybe I could tweak my own workflows to be even faster and safer?
What will you do?
What I’ve outlined above is a very specific example that I’ve used in my clinical work to feel like I am making some meaningful difference in the world with my work.
The point was to highlight that even in a protocolised, rigid and complex system like healthcare, there are small change that you can make that may make a disproportionate impact. I have no idea if my plan has or will have any meaningful impact but I’m excited to try and find out.
What’s something you could try today in your job that could possibly change the world?
