TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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Welcome back to Lean by Design.
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I'm your host, Oscar, and in continuation with our last few episodes, we're gonna dive right into my new book, Predictably Broken.
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This comes from Chapter 2, Research Operations.
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Many of these challenges don't come about because of one catastrophic issue or team member.
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Instead, they resemble death by a thousand cuts.
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The result?
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A collection of poor habits, misaligned incentives, inadequate training, and a culture that prioritizes scientific output while overlooking operational rigor.
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In these situations, it's important to understand that no one person broke the system.
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That's important because blame is a dead end.
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You can blame and fire a single person or even put them on a pip that's simply a band-aid on a broken system.
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Death by a thousand cuts.
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What I mean is that each individual issue will look manageable.
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A misstep here, a miscommunication there, a new employee.
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It's the accumulation that's the problem.
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Remember that humans are survivalists in our personal lives and are professional.
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So when we're met with an obstacle, we will find another way around the problem.
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And in most cases, we never get back to the root of the issue.
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Prioritizing scientific output over operational rigor is a cultural norm in biopharma.
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It's not an exception.
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The rat race that is research into the clinic, into approvals, is one that every organization faces.
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The fix isn't more discipline.
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In some cases, it's the redesigning of the environment so that the good habits are the path of least resistance.
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So, how many cuts can you identify right now?
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Those minor inconveniences that together threaten to slow your operations and decrease the value of the work that goes in.
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We experience these every day.
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And in most cases, we'll find a way to bury it or make it someone else's problem.
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I'm here to say they accumulate, they don't disappear.
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Find out more about what these cuts look like and how to fix them by checking out Predictably Broken in digital, paperback, and hardback.
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Thanks so much for spending your time with us today.
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We truly appreciate you being part of the Lean by Design Community.
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If this conversation resonated with you, we invite you to check our new book, where we take a candid perspective on the patterns of operational friction that quietly slow teams down and what to do about them.
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If you're ready to take the next step, head over to our website, Sigmalab Consulting.com.
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We'll see you next time.