Would you become a patient at a hospital where the mortality rate was one in ten? You might think that this hospital was dealing with a deadly disease and doing the best they could with a tragic illness. However, this is the statistic that women who were giving birth faced when they came to Vienna’s General Hospital in the mid-1800’s.
A Problem Solving Story
One of the doctors at this research hospital wanted to find out why. He noticed that patients who gave birth in the mid-wife ward had a lower mortality rate of 1 in 50. He tried to figure out what was different between these two wards and nothing seemed to resolve the issue. Then this doctor left for a four month leave of absence. When he came back, he learned that while he was gone that the mortality rate had gotten significantly better. The doctor was faced with an answer he had not considered before. Maybe HE was the problem.
This led him to finding the ultimate solution. Doctors in this research hospital were doing work with cadavers, and they were not sterilizing their hands between work with the cadavers and with living patients. As soon as the doctors started to sterilize their hands before examining any patient, the death rate immediately fell to one in a hundred.
This actual hospital case history is shared in the book, Leadership and Self-Deception, by The Arbinger Institute. For me, the story of this doctor is one that we all fall prey to. Often when we have a problem, we first want to look outside of ourselves.
Our Role in Problem Solving
Yet, I have found that the most effective step to resolving problems comes when we first look at ourselves. I will share a story from my own life with my daughter. When she comes home from school, we always have homework to tackle. I often saw homework as a task and a hurdle to getting through all of the other things that needed to be accomplished that day. In doing this, I also started to view my daughter as an object and a task in my day.
The anxiety in me would build. As soon as my daughter came through the door to our home, I was taking her through a long list of tasks and treating her like a task. She needed to eat her snack, read her book, practice her spelling, etc. However, my daughter did not want to cooperate. Math problems that should not have taken long, got drawn out. Arguments would ensue about whether she spelled a spelling word right. You get the picture.
It was easy to think that my daughter was the problem. She just needed an attitude adjustment. Or, it was easy to blame the school. Why do they have to give so much homework? But none of those “reasons” (or should I say excuses and blame) led to a solution. The solution became evident when I started to look at myself.
A Problem Solving Solution
The problem was my heart attitude and how I was viewing her. I was seeing my daughter as an “object” blocking the way to a goal or result, instead of viewing her as a “person” with thoughts and feelings just like me. I was not being very loving or caring. How do you respond at work when someone treats you like an obstacle instead of a person? Does this inspire you to work as a team, or do you instead fulfill that person’s expectation of you by becoming that obstacle to getting work done?
So, I changed my way of being with my daughter. Notice that I said “way of being” not “way of doing.” It is not just doing the right interpersonal behaviors but about a right heart attitude. When she walked in the door from school, I sought to know her as a person. I got her a snack and just asked questions about her day and really listened. I asked what homework she wanted to do first because I really valued her opinion. By changing my way of being with her, she began to cooperate. And guess what? Homework got done in record time to reach our goals and results for the evening.
So when you notice a problem, take time to look within first. What is your way of being? How do you perceive people around you? Do you see them as people or objects? As you see them as people, can you feel the change at a heart level within yourself? The secret is looking within, to not just doing the right behaviors but also having the right heart attitude and perspective of others.