No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.
― John F. Kennedy
An emergency room (ER) nurse kept hearing complaints from
patients who had been waiting for hours to see a doctor.
After reading The 2,000 Percent Solution, she began to keep
track of how long it took various kinds of patients to get
the attention they needed. She was shocked to find that
those who were too sick or injured to explain their
problems but who appeared to be okay sometimes waited for
more than 10 hours ― even if they needed immediate
treatment. This nurse shared her concerns with the other ER
nurses and physicians. They discussed possible solutions
and decided to train the guards at the door to spot people
who couldn’t explain about themselves and bring a triage
nurse immediately to check the patient. Waiting time for
these vulnerable, hard-to-diagnose patients dropped to less
than 10 minutes. Although her colleagues didn’t know it,
they had just put in place a 2,000 percent solution.
A 2,000 percent solution is any method of accomplishing
what your organization does now with zero-to-four percent
of the current time and resources, or accomplishing an
increase of 20 times in results while employing the same or
fewer resources. A combination of those results can also be
a 2,000 percent solution.
That much improvement probably sounds pretty extreme to
you. It shouldn’t. We’ve all seen 2,000 percent solutions,
but we don’t usually label them as such. For instance, a
slow reader takes a course in better reading methods.
Reading speed increases from 100 words to 1,100 words a
minute while comprehension of what is read doubles. The
reading speed increase is a 10-fold improvement, [(1,100 –
100)/100 = 10], and the doubling of comprehension allows
twice as much to be comprehended in whatever reading time
is involved. When you multiply reading 10 times faster by
double the comprehension, you have a 2,000 percent solution
― a 2,000 percent increase in reading comprehension
per minute from the same time and effort.
What brought 2,000 percent solutions to my attention? I was
attracted to this subject of creating 2,000 percent
solutions because my family depended on a small business
when I was growing up, and 2,000 percent solutions made an
enormous difference in this operation and in my life. I
hope this concept will do the same for you, your family,
and your business or nonprofit organization, whether you
lead it or simply work there.
Let’s look at some more examples to help you grasp what a
2,000 percent solution is. Technology often helps us speed
results without increasing resources. For example, you can
send material halfway around the world now in an e-mail for
a tiny fraction of the cost and time of sending an air
courier package. E-mail is also a 2,000 percent solution
compared to the best method commonly available 20 years
ago: sending a facsimile.
Thinking more clearly about the implications of what needs
to be done can have a similar effect without waiting for
technology to advance. For instance, many electronic
products are now designed to have many fewer parts than the
products they replace. Consequently, repairing products
with fewer parts takes much less time and reduces costs.
For more expensive products, the parts are often monitored
electronically to note when they are about to fail. The
message that failure is imminent is sent to the repair
person before the failure. The part is replaced, and the
customer never experiences a problem. Repeat sales and
profits improve as a result. For less expensive products,
online resources allow customers to diagnose their
problems, implement the proper solutions, and receive
faster results at much less cost than providing hands-on
repairs.
Sharing information throughout organizations has had
similar effects. Many organizations now use business
intelligence software that allows everyone to know what
performance is in the activities each person influences. As
a result, fewer problems occur and the solutions come
faster and less expensively.
More recently, organizations have learned to access better
ideas inexpensively by involving large numbers of experts
through online contests. Goldcorp was a pioneer in this
effort when it sponsored the Goldcorp Challenge in March
2000. Hundreds of the world’s best geologists looked at
Goldcorp’s exploratory drilling results online and produced
a number of excellent suggestions. By spending a few
hundred thousand dollars for a Web site and prizes,
Goldcorp located new gold reserves worth hundreds of
millions.
Topping that success, Larry Huston, vice president of R&D,
Innovation, and Knowledge for Procter & Gamble (P&G),
reported in October 2005 that P&G had run more than 200
versions of the Goldcorp Challenge since 2000. These
contests had yielded innovations with a success rate of
over 80 percent, increased the company’s R&D productivity
by 45 percent, and provided 35 percent of all of P&G’s
successful innovations in recent years.
From these examples, you can see that breakthroughs are
possible for providing 2,000 percent solutions to the most
important organizational tasks. By considering these
examples, I hope you’ll be able to see possible variations
on their themes to establish 2,000 percent solutions for
important tasks where no one yet dreams of such
improvements.
Copyright 2007 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved
—————————————————-
Donald Mitchell is chairman of Mitchell and Company, a
strategy and financial consulting firm in Weston, MA. He
is coauthor of six books including The 2,000 Percent
Squared Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, The Portable
2,000 Percent Solution, and The 2,000 Percent Solution
Workbook. You can read about his work on improving
effectiveness at http://www.2000percentsolution.com .
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