The team isn’t gelling. We’re missing deadlines. Mistakes keep repeating. We’re siloed. We show up late to meetings even though we committed to being on time. Even at home the chores we agreed to do go undone and there’s a lot of snark.
We’re flummoxed. We bring in consultants. Countless resources find their way into our inboxes every day. Change management tools. We try stuff.
Yet we still miss the mark. We feel in our gut there’s a “better.”
Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal might yield some clues. His work about how misguidedly we deal with aging included a story about the transformation of a nursing home that made me wonder if there is a more basic and holistic way of diagnosing and treating our culture headaches.
Plants and birds and rocks and things
Bill Thomas, a young Harvard-trained physician, left the ER in 1991 to become the medical director of Chase Memorial Nursing Home. An Upstate New York facility housing eighty elderly residents suffering from physical disabilities and Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of cognitive decline.
He saw despair in every room. He thought they might have been misdiagnosed. Or had the wrong mix of meds. So he examined them. But that wasn’t it.
He lived on a farm with his wife and five children. They grew their own food and raised animals. Operated a sawmill and sugarhouse and generated their own wind and solar power.
He realized that the nursing home conditions were the opposite of any form of self-sufficiency. Care was aimed at routines and safety.
He got to work getting to know the people inside the residents. They’d been everything from teachers to shopkeepers to housewives and factory workers.
Thomas concluded that the nursing home practices led to what he called the “Three Plagues” of existence. Boredom. Loneliness. Helplessness.
He came to believe that life itself was the missing ingredient. So life he brought in. Plants. Birds (100 parakeets). Dogs and cats. Bunnies and hens. Vegetable and flower gardens. And the children of the staff. Eventually a child-care and after-school program.
Fast and smooth it wasn’t. Hilariously chaotic it was. At first. Then it took hold. Turned lives of despair into lives of purpose and connection and joy.
People started speaking for the first time. Withdrawn and non-ambulatory residents asked to walk the dog. All the parakeets were adopted and given names.
Medical prescriptions and death rates dropped.
Thomas had no formal experience to do any of this. He brought a powerful combination of a beginner’s mind along with a deep connection to the natural order of life. And no fear of trying unconventional things.
The Eden Alternative was born out of this. Spreading these practices well beyond the Chase Memorial Nursing Home.
Hidden in plain sight?
It’s stretch to apply the lessons of an 80-resident nursing home to our organizational challenges. But it does make me wonder.
What if we were to put away the research and theory and idea of the day and just try to see with our own eyes what’s going on? Observe with a scientist’s curiosity and a human lens.
What could be at work in our workplaces (or homes) that’s equivalent to the mismatch of the practices at Chase Memorial to the real problems of their residents?
Thomas didn’t start by engineering a new process. He focused on the residents as people.
What’s missing for our people? What’s keeping our team from gelling? Causing our silos? Keeping us from meeting deadlines? Preventing us from showing up to meetings on time? Or doing our chores at home?