Posts Tagged As Zero Defects

How do you handle failure at home, at school, or at work? Do you plan for it?

Today Peter Sims wrote about my favorite topic Failure in an article for the HBR Blog titled “The No. 1 Enemy of Creativity: Fear of Failure.”  Sims comments on how parents, teachers, and bosses all push us to prevent errors and mitigate risks.  He points out how entrepreneurs and designers have a different frame of mind toward failure seeing “mistakes” as part of the trial-and-error processes of driving innovation.  Sims calls for each of us to revolt against this thinking and to no longer be “shackled by these norms.”

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Should we learn to tolerate failure… even in the medical profession?

In an NY Times Op-Ed article yesterday, neurosurgeon and journalist Sanjay Gupta (@sanjayguptaCNN) cited a recent anonymous survey where orthopedic surgeons said “24 percent of the tests they ordered were medically unnecessary.”  The suggestion was that the surgeons were performing the unnecessary tests as a form of “defensive medicine” that is meant less to help the patient than to protect the doctor and hospital from lawsuits.  Why has it come to this?  How has society come to expect “zero defects” from the medical industry?

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