In 1999, two doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital were watching the F1 on the staff room TV. They observed the precision of a pit stop team in action:
Perfect communication. Calm, coordinated choreography balancing speed, risk and efficiency.
In comparison, their own patient handover processes at Great Ormond Street were chaotic, uncoordinated and put lives at risk.
Eager to learn, they reached out to Ferrari to observe a pit stop crew first hand. Ferrari engineers even agreed to visit Great Ormond Street. Their verdict?
Too many people, too much noise, no clear leaderRoss Brawn, Ferrari's technical director
Together they redesigned the handover process from scratch, reducing patient transfer errors by 67%. And the protocols they put in place have since been adopted by hospitals all over the world.
The medical teams who created the original processes were not lacking experience. On the contrary, they'd spent decades inside healthcare. But that's the problem. They were so deep inside their own system that they missed the lessons to be learnt elsewhere. Psychologists call it the curse of knowledge.
So after such dramatic improvements gained from stepping outside their industry, why is the NHS still making the same mistakes?
Just a few years later in 2003, the NHS launched one of the most catastrophic technology procurement failures in history. The National Programme for IT cost over £10 billion and delivered almost nothing.
Why? Because public sector projects like this tend to be exclusively contracted to the same pool of healthcare suppliers. A closed loop, isolated from the innovations happening in other industries. Many NHS trusts are still running on infrastructure built in the 1990s.
But while some industries remain trapped in their bubbles, others have taken note.
In a world where banks believed they were untouchable, an unlikely founder built a team not on banking experience but on user experience design and engineering. His name was Tom Blomfield and he founded Monzo. The young millennials who made those iconic coral bank cards famous have matured – and taken Monzo with them. 12 million customers later and an industry-leading satisfaction score, the big banks are shaking. Because sometimes the best person to fix an industry is someone who hasn't been trained to accept its limitations.
So next time you face a challenge at work, try finding inspiration from elsewhere. Your answer might be found in the most unlikely places – stepping onto a bus like our friend Henri Poincaré, who I wrote about earlier this year , or watching the F1, as did our two doctors from Great Ormond Street.