Communication's the name of the game

Telling stories with lessons imbedded in them is a time-tested tool to drill messages into the minds of kids who wouldn’t otherwise spend a minute with outright moral science lectures.

The Amar Chitra Kathas we read as kids did precisely this, as did the Akbar and Birbal tales. In contemporary times, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies Director Bibek Debroy tried to use comics as a tool to get the message of power sector reforms and reduction of theft losses across to young minds—nothing like your five-year old telling you “papa please don’t steal electricity” to get people to reform.

The problem, as Debroy admits, was that the comics didn’t really click, since, unlike JK Rowling, the people who wrote them weren’t quite able to connect with the target audience.

So it is heartening to see the concept resurfacing, this time through murder mysteries, and fairly successfully at that. The two head-nurse Nan mysteries aren’t quite John Grisham (actually Robin Cook, since they’re set in a medical environment), but they do a wonderful job of making people comfortable with, and willing to try, complex management tools like Six Sigma quality techniques.

Besides, even if the narrative is a bit stretched out, too stiff and often forced, the novelty of the plot is good enough to paper this over.

In Nan: A Six Sigma Mystery, one of the two mysteries Nan needs to solve in order to absolve a colleague of criminal negligence is why the hospital’s biggest benefactor and the chairman of the board died as the nurse did not rush in to defibrillate him for a good ten minutes after the EKG alarm that his heart had stopped pumping.

Since Nan has no doubts about her colleague’s abilities (sound management practice number one!), it has to be the machine that’s at fault, she reasons. From here, it’s easy. She has a dream computer assistant and a brilliant geek of a husband who help solve the crime.

While it’s great to see that Nan’s computer assistant is an Indian, a sign of India’s growing prowess, he’s ingratiatingly bowing and scraping all the time, which shows how racial prejudices remain, and how Peter Sellers in The Party has left a lasting image.

In another case, of a child dying due to the wrong medicine being given by the nurse, having once again decided her colleagues were not to blame (hope you’re reading this, Mr Boss!), Nan figures that the problem lies in poor communication—the doctor told the nurse to give a certain medicine but he had no way of knowing if the nurse understood him correctly.

Enter John Wayne movies: when the captain of a submarine gives an order, it is repeated by the person who receives it, and the same way down the line. That way, the person giving the order knows that the person receiving the order has understood it. Obvious, you’d say. Well, that’s the first lesson in Six Sigma.

Six Sigma’s usually used in factory environments, in getting down the level of “rejects” to under four per million for instance, and this book’s avowed aim is to get people to understand it can be used in service environments as well, such as a hospital.

What it also does, by design or otherwise, is show how Six Sigma can work in the home. Amazing, isn’t it, that Nan manages to catch up with her work at night, after she’s baked enough pies to go around at the office meeting the next day?!

At the end of the day, Six Sigma or not, nothing works like the old pie-type diplomacy or the good old show of force. So, Nan’s secretary has this cookie jar that everyone’s always digging into.

On one occasion when a unit head refuses to cooperate with Nan, the secretary conjures up a situation in which the unit head thinks she’s being transferred to Nan’s nursing section (the card-printer calls up to ask her what she wants printed under the “nursing section” portion of the card), and so does exactly what Nan wants her to do!