“When I die, let it be in a meeting. The transition from life to death will be barely perceptible.”
—Anonymous

Today I’m going to share some ideas from an always-thoughtful newsletter written by Steve Harden of LifeWings—a company of pilots who use aviation ideas to create cultures of safety in healthcare. Despite the healthcare bias, these ideas can easily be adapted to any environment as you think about your jobs as improvement leaders.

Harden offered these data:
• The average hospital spends $1.7 million per year on meetings.
• 86 percent of healthcare leaders surveyed said their meetings are a waste of time.

Is accountability used as an excuse for draconian enforcement of arbitrary goals? We’re familiar with the insanity of wasted time spent overreacting to common cause. I remember the dreaded review meetings, spending all day listening to litanies of excuses, finger pointing, blaming others, and carefully crafted stories to explain lack of results, all of which only yielded confusion and an attitude of helplessness.

Has “Who’s to blame?” been replaced by “Who’s accountable?”

“When we are dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bustling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.”
—Dale Carnegie

Accountability should no longer mean “account for.” Accountability should be powered by commitment and hard work with a focus on current and future efforts, rather than reactive and historical explanations, with a mindset of reality, ownership, solutions to problems, and determined action that answer the question, “What else is it going to take?”

To celebrate Father’s Day in the United States (June 21 this year), I’m going to use this and my next column to honor my late dad by using a game he loved—golf—to teach some very basic statistics lessons. Some of these may have been lost on you previously, not through some fault of your own, but rather from trainers’ tendency to concentrate on a technique’s mechanics. Analysis of means (ANOM) might be new to many of you, but even if it’s a review, I hope you have as much fun reading this as I did writing it.

The recent Masters tournament, in which 97 golfers participated, will provide the data. The Masters is the crème-de-la-crème of golf tournaments. One qualifies by winning a major tournament or by formal invitation. Past champions qualify automatically.

The first two rounds of any tournament are used to establish the “cut” to narrow the field for the last two rounds. Cut rule: Following the second round, the 50 golfers with the lowest scores, plus ties, plus any golfer within 10 strokes of the lead, advance to play the final two rounds. In this case, players with scores above 146 were cut, narrowing the field from 97 to 55.

Here’s the analysis of variance (ANOVA) for the first two rounds:

Welcome to baseball season! I always do a baseball-themed article around this time, and I found my topic after stumbling on this article recently: How accurate are umpires when calling balls and strikes?

From what I understand, since 2008, home plate umpires have been electronically monitored every game and given immediate feedback on their accuracy—i.e., the number of actual balls they called as strikes, and vice versa.

Using the aggregated data from the 2008–2013 seasons, the author observed that wrong calls were made 15 percent of the time (average of both rates combined), which, according to him, “is just too high.” He provided a table of umpires whose inaccuracy rate was 15 percent or higher—38 umpires out of approximately 80 (Tsk, tsk... that’s close to half of them.)

He also listed the top 10 most accurate umpires. Oops—I mean the 10 umpires who happened to have the lowest rates of wrong calls.