ORACLE

By Doug Samuelson

Once again the OR/MS analyst was enjoying an all-too-infrequent dinner with his Aunt Sarah, his first piano teacher and a long-time general mentor. Fall was finally in the air, the summer’s heat and humidity gone, and they were savoring the cool evening on the awning-covered back patio of one of their favorite restaurants, overlooking a beautiful bay. The wine and dessert had them feeling well fed and warmly satisfied.

“I do need some new advice,” the analyst requested. “Work is going well – very well, in fact. Now, though, I have a new opportunity – and a new challenge. You know how long I’ve been trying to break into healthcare as an application? Well, now I have a couple of doctors teaming with me, and we think we can really make a difference in how some things are done. One of the doctors is working with me to develop a short course for other medical professionals, to ‘train the trainers’ to do what he has succeeded with in applying O.R. methods to emergency departments, his area of responsibility.”

“That sounds good,” Aunt Sarah smiled. “So what’s the concern?”

“We got the idea of teaching a version of the course to O.R. analysts,” the analyst explained. “We thought we’d use it to show them how to communicate complete solutions, not just techniques, to clients in this field, in language that connects well with the clients’ major concerns and helps them implement the findings. But the response has been mixed. We’re not teaching a lot about new tools and techniques, and some of my O.R. colleagues are fixated on that part of the profession. How do we convey to them how important it is to learn to ‘speak health care’ and think like the clients if you actually want to make a difference in what they do?”

“You probably don’t, with many of them,” Aunt Sarah shrugged. “We’ve talked before about how many of your colleagues think they’re practicing applied O.R. if they get an overview of a real problem, come back with a proposed solution the client can’t implement and then go off and write a nice journal article about it. Then they complain about how the profession isn’t appreciated. Right?”

“Right,” the O.R. analyst acknowledged glumly. “But that’s what the profession rewards. Even in judging for the profession’s competitive awards, innovation in the methods used tends to count pretty heavily, and the finagling we sometimes have to do to get the client to use the results gets discounted – or worse. Just having applied relatively simple O.R. methods to an important problem, with huge benefits, doesn’t seem to get the same respect. I recall one award entry, years ago, that was all about correcting problems in a legacy inventory system. Rather than fighting the massive battle to get the whole system revamped or replaced, they figured out how to generate inputs that would get the system to produce the right answers. Basically, they derived the correct lies to tell the system to get the results to come out right. And one of the judges protested, ‘These entries are all going to be articles in one of our most respected journals. We can’t publish an article about lying to a system!’ And that, over my objections, killed that entry.”

“I see the problem,” Aunt Sarah nodded.

“So what do I do?” the analyst persisted.

Aunt Sarah reflected for a minute or so. Then she suggested, “Maybe you tell them a story you told me some years ago – do you remember? It was about a seminar W. Edwards Deming, the great quality control expert, gave at one of the local universities.”

The analyst shrugged, unsure.

“As I recall, he was introduced by one of the professors, who waxed eloquent about how gifted Deming was. It seems that in addition to his work on quality, he also composed music! He had written several classical pieces. And when he got up, he thanked the professor for the introduction, but then he added, ‘You know, anyone can write music. The hard part is getting people to listen to it!’ ”

“Yes, now I remember,” the analyst laughed. “And then he added, ‘What I’ve done in quality control isn’t difficult, either. Most of you in this room could have done all of it. The hard part has been getting people to listen to it.’ I can see why my question reminded you of this story.”

“In the music business,” Aunt Sarah resumed, “people have to learn not just how to make music, but also how to get engagements, how to handle the arrangements smoothly, how to deal with booking agents, how to make sure you leave a good impression so you get repeat gigs – again, all the activities that get people to listen to your music. Just point this out, maybe by repeating the Deming story. Those who don’t get it won’t get it, but those who do will learn and prosper, and maybe their success will motivate others to want to learn how to do it, too. I’d say that’s the best you can do.”

Doug Samuelson (samuelsondoug@yahoo.com) is president and chief scientist of InfoLogix, Inc., in Annandale, Va. This column is a shameless plug for the short course he and David Eitel, an emergency department physician, are scheduled to teach at the INFORMS national meeting in Charlotte in November using O.R.-based improvements in emergency departments (the subject of an article they co-authored in the August issue of OR/MS Today) to demonstrate how to communicate O.R. thinking to medical administrators.