Q2: What are you most proud of achieving with TOC? Why are you proud of
this?
The thing I am most proud of achieving with TOC is definitely that I
could inspire a lot of people to take the challenge of shifting to a new
paradigm in healthcare management. It took a long time and a lot of support
from several TOC experts to transfer my good feeling about TOC, which started
back in 1985 as I wrote in my little essay for Eli, into a workable solution
for Dutch healthcare. Of course I was lucky (but it’s not luck..) to meet the right people at the right time and to work with
a few people who trusted me on my blue eyes. Of course I had a lot of septic
people in my audiences who helped me to learn more, to ask more, to think more
and thus getting me more focused on the subject. And now there is a growing
community of ‘believers’ if you like that are thoroughly aware of
the enormous value of TOC as a new way of managing organizations. And the
really big difference is: it is fun to do! I only see smiling people around me,
as if they discovered a new secret…. And that’s exactly why I am
proud on what I achieved with TOC: it can not be stopped any more, that is for
sure!
Ok, don’t let me take myself too far from the subject. Because in spite of my pride of what we reached so far, there is so much more to do and so much more to learn and so many more people to convince. There are only about 100 hospitals in The Netherlands and a lot more institutions for elderly care, we talk about 1 million people working in healthcare to date. We spend about 70 billion Euros every year on healthcare (which is some 10 percent of our national gross product). When you realize that there is not really a capacity constraint within the system itself (a lot of policy constraints, that’s for sure) and we prove to be able to free up 20 to 40% of that capacity, then you know we are talking about of lot of money being wasted. And that means that we still have a major task to perform. Not to mention the rest of Europe….. I love the red curve!
