We are confronted with the following situation. Dinwiddie Management is a large local administrative company. It provides administrative services statewide, including accounting, compensation, and administrative services. I am the HR manager, who deals with the insurance company who provides our workmen’s compensation account. This person has informed me that, beginning in March of the current year—and plausibly extending into April—there has been an unusual rise in doctors’ visits for wrist pain. Our problem is to decide how to gain the additional information required to deal with this problem effectively, and to diagnose its cause.
We have three primary questions: (1) what information is central to diagnosing the case? (2) what questions should I ask the agent? And (3) where should I go for additional information? We must also suggest a cause of the problem, and describe a strategy for mitigating it.
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"Management Failure".
Essentially we need to know why the increase has occurred. There are five broad categories of possibilities. First, the increase might be coincidental. There are fluctuations in the numbers involved in insurance applications such as ours—including their relative likelihood to other complaints—and we must determine whether our problem is merely a predictable statistical anomaly. Second, there could have been a change in insurance coverage over the period in question. Third, there could have been a change in the activities we ask our employees to perform, for example increased computer usage. Fourth, it is at least a possibility that our employees have been caught up, whether wittingly or not, in a kind of insurance scam. And finally, the increase could have been due to some as yet identifiable cause.
What questions can we ask the agent, in order to eliminate some among our initial possibilities? We can certainly ask the agent whether the deviation in question is normal. It is presumably not, or else he or she would not have brought it to our attention. So we can provisionally rule out the first possibility. Likewise with the second possibility. The agent would be aware of any relevant change, and would have factored that into the initial notification. So we are left with only our final three possibilities.
The problem with the third option is that we would presumably be aware of changes in the duties we have asked our employees to perform—including a change in computer usage, or a change in computer programs used. So we can probably rule that out as well. As for the possibility of an insurance scam, this seems both unlikely, and outside our purview as HR managers. If this is the cause of the deviation in question, it is not clear that it is our responsibility to deal with it. (Which is not to say, of course, that we should not pass the information along to parties better equipped to handle it.)
So we are left with something of a mystery. We have ruled out all likely causes of the increase. We therefore have to ask where we can look for further information. The best candidate here is to seek out information concerning companies which have faced similar problems. At least some of this information ought to be publicly available. It is unlikely that our company is unique in this regard, and if we find out what other companies have faced problems like this—and how they dealt with them—then we will be on our way to a solution.
What if we identify a specific hypothesis as most likely? I have mentioned why certain hypotheses are relatively unlikely, or how they might be dealt with, previously in the paper. But failing further progress, I would suggest looking into the employees who are availing themselves of the health care options in question. Do they have anything in common? Is there a way for me to intervene in a way that is beneficial to the company? These are the approaches I would take.
I think the reason it might be suggested that what is happening is here is an example of ‘Management Failure’ is that there are not many possibilities for the sort of deviation we have been discussing. We should obviously focus our attention on those factors which we are able to control, at least to some extent. In that way viewing the problems as failures of management will stand the best chance of being productive.
