Over the years, oncologist Barbara McAneny, MD, had grown increasingly frustrated with what hospitals were doing to her patients. Every time chemotherapy complications sent someone to an emergency room, which happens all too often, “they’d come out a little bit worse, each time just another step down in their quality of life.” They’d sometimes contract other infections while waiting for hours for the cause of their fever or diarrhea to be diagnosed. And if admitted, they’d grow weaker and disoriented lying in a bed. The longer they wait for their first dose of antibiotics, the more likely they will become septic and end up in the intensive care unit, she said. If only she could keep them away from hospitals. Keeping Chemo Patients Away From Hospitals, medpagetoday.com, November 11, 2016.

Hospitals keep us healthy right? The best place to be if one is not feeling well has got to be a hospital. Well as it happens, no.

The notion that hospitals are in fact risky instead of health-enhancing does not follow conventional wisdom. The data has long been out there that hospitals are a risky place but few people seem to be aware of that.

The moral of this story and many like it is that we need to regularly challenge what we believe to be common wisdom. In every project, we do many of the same things over and over again. These are so because we believe they add value to our project. When we get a chance to deep dive into a step in the process or when we notice something just not seeming right is when we have an opening to update our understanding of what is contributing and what is making a positive difference. Don’t be surprised when what we learn is completely contrary to what we had believed. This insight then becomes an inflection point to where we can either act on this new insight and make things better or take it as an improved understanding and place this step in its proper place as to how important it is to our project.

Compare with STOP DOING THAT as a project management tool.

When was the last time you gained a deeper understanding into some part of your project that profoundly changed how you understood a routine task’s contribution to your project’s success?